'Remember me in your prayers,' airman said

The last e-mail that Connie Stephens received from her foster son, Senior Airman William N. Newman, asked, "Remember me in your prayers."

On Thursday, two days after Newman sent the note, the former Highland resident died of wounds suffered in the detonation of an improvised explosive device south of Balad, Iraq.

Newman, 23, was assigned to the Explosive Ordinance Disposal Team, 15th Civil Engineer Squadron, based at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. There, his squadron commander had high praise for him.

"Senior Airman Will Newman is a hero," Lt. Col. Dave Maharrey said in a press release issued Sunday. "He died while defusing a terrorist IED, in an area where Iraqi women and children's lives were in danger."

Newman was a 2002 graduate of Lone Peak High School, where he was a yell leader. He and his sister, Emily, lived in Highland in the home of Jay and Connie Stephens. The four Newman siblings are related to the Stephens family.

"When he lived with me — I have eight children of my own — ... we had all four of them (the Newman children) at one time," Connie Stephens said. Usually, though, they provided a home for their own children as well as William and Emily Newman.

After 12 years with the Stephens family, William Newman graduated from high school. He moved to Tennessee to live with his father and joined the Air Force.

He is listed by the Defense Department as a resident of Kingston Springs, Tenn. While in the United States he lived with his wife, So Young, at Hickam AFB near Honolulu. They would have been married two years this August, she said.

"He was looking forward to coming home," Stephens added. He was to return from Iraq in three or four weeks.

She had written him asking if she could send a package. In his last e-mail he responded that "he didn't feel like there was going to be time to send a package, and he wasn't sure where he was going to be at.

"He was training new people to take over his job so he could come home."

While he wrote that he wanted to be remembered in prayers, she said, "I don't feel like he thought he was in danger." His death "caught everybody off-guard."

She remembered her foster son as quiet but very sensitive. He "never complained about anything ... (although he'd had) a rough time in his life."

He had many friends in Utah and simply wanted to put troubled times behind him and go forward, she said.