New York native Willy Joseph Cancel, 22, left behind his 22-year-old wife Brittany — who is also a Marine veteran — and their seven-month-old son, Anthony, in March after he took a paid job with a private service contracting company “to protect the innocent” in Ukraine, his father wrote on a GoFundMe page.
On Tuesday, Cancel’s wife received “the worst call of her life,” when she was notified that her husband was killed in battle, the father expressed.
“‘Your husband fought bravely but unfortunately he did not make it,’” she was told in a phone call.
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“Since that April 26th phone call, her life has completely fallen apart and now she has to figure out how to build it back together, to figure out how to raise her son without his father or financial support,” the father noted on the fundraising site, which has raised over $61,000 as of Saturday.
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“As a family, we are trying to support them as much as possible and be there for each other, but Brittany and Anthony will need more than what we can provide.”
The fundraiser hopes to raise enough money to sustain Cancel’s wife and son.
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“He will grow up without a father, a father who was brave and selfless and whose life was senselessly lost,” Cancel’s father reported about his grandson.
“While he will grow knowing that his father died a hero, we know this will not be easy. No parent should ever have to bury their child, and no child should have to grow up without a parent.”
Cancel, who is initially from Orange County and functioned as a volunteer firefighter in Walden, flew to Poland on March 12 and arrived in Ukraine the next day to fight alongside men from “all different countries,” his mother Rebecca Cabrera briefed CNN on Friday.
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The circumstances of Cancel’s death were unclear and his body was not instantly recovered, Cabrera stated. Cabrera expressed that Cancel "always put everybody ahead of himself."
"He was just a thoughtful person. He always put everybody ahead of himself even when situations were so stressful," Cabrera said of her son. "He always kept everybody laughing and calm. He was the man that stood up when everybody else stood back."
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Tietze said Cancel was the "type to fight for what's right regardless of the outcome," when asked why Cancel was determined to join the fight in Ukraine.
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"He believed wholeheartedly this shouldn't have happened and he wanted to go help the people in Ukraine," Tietze expressed in a phone interview.
Cancel formerly served as a rifleman in the Marines and was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, the Marine Corps said Friday.
He had no war-zone deployments and was given a bad-conduct discharge after disobeying a lawful general order, Marine Corps spokesman Maj. Jim Stenger declared.
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