Prince K. Teewia

Wednesday, January 04 2006 @ 07:47 AM EST

Tuscaloosa News -- An immigrant who managed to avoid the gunbattles that tore apart his homeland of Liberia during his teen years, then joined the U.S. Army to afford a college education, was killed in Iraq, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Spc. Prince K. Teewia, 27, of Durham died Thursday in Baghdad, Iraq, when a bomb exploded near his Humvee, the Defense Department said.

He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky. He was one of five soldiers from Fort Campbell killed since Thursday.

Family members urged him against volunteering for military service in wartime, but without the money to visit his wife after two years and without prospects for an education as he worked at a Durham convenience store, Teewia took a chance and lost his life.

"We told him not to do it. No one wants a child to join the Army" in wartime, said his mother, Rebecca Teewia of Newark, Del.

But war in Liberia had scattered the Teewia family for years at a time, and Prince was left to make his own choices on how to get ahead in the world, his mother said.

Rebecca Teewia was visiting family in the United States when civil war broke out in Liberia in 1989. She's wasn't able to return, but one by one found ways for Prince's four older siblings to leave the west African country before they were caught up in the war.

While Prince found shelter from the worst of the fighting during the 1990s in neighboring Sierra Leone, he wasn't able to reunite with his mother and father in Durham until 1998.

Teewia's parents moved to Delaware for work the following year, and Prince moved in with a house full of friends including his cousin, Daniel Kayee.

In 2002, he married his childhood sweetheart Ijema, nicknamed "Maria," in Nigeria, where her family had fled from Liberia, Kayee said. He never saw her again.

"They were writing each other and he was trying to make preparations for her to be here," Kayee said.

Teewia worked at a convenience store and attended North Carolina Central University in Durham, hoping to earn a degree in computer engineering. But he couldn't pull together enough money to keep going, so he made the surprising decision to take up arms for the United States after avoiding guns earlier in his life, Kayee said.

"He never hold arms at all," Kayee said. "We grew up in a Christian home. We don't believe in violence. We don't believe in fighting."

His mother didn't know of his decision to enlist in March 2004 until after he arrived at Fort Campbell that August, she said. Rebecca Teewia said she didn't know her son was married until after his death.

"He and I knew things about each other that he didn't even tell his parents," Kayee said.

One of those things was that Prince regretted his four-year enlistment. He didn't want to go to Iraq and wasn't receiving the training in computers promised to him, Kayee said.

"Everything they told him was different," Kayee said.

Still, Kayee said he considered his cousin a hero for giving up his life for his adopted country.

Teewia's family is trying to decide whether to bury Prince in the United States or in Liberia, as Kayee said Prince preferred. But it's unlikely the family can afford to send the body to Africa, just as it's doubtful Prince Teewia's wife can afford to attend a funeral in the United States, Kayee said.

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