Ohio sailor died saving others after collision
CLEVELAND — Family members and friends of a Navy sailor from Ohio say he was just months away from retiring and was thinking about becoming an auto mechanic when he was killed last weekend in a collision between a destroyer and a container ship off Japan.
Fire Controlman 1st Class Gary Leo Rehm Jr., 37, was among seven sailors killed aboard the USS Fitzgerald when a Philippineflagged container ship collided with it early Saturday. Authorities have declined to speculate on a cause. A delay in reporting the collision is under investigation.
Friends and relatives on Monday described the sailor from Elyria, roughly 25 miles west of Cleveland, as generous and easygoing. They say the Navy told his mother that Rehm died trying to rescue fellow sailors trapped in flooding compartments on the USS Fitzgerald.
The Navy didn’t immediately respond Monday to messages seeking comment, and a telephone number for Rehm’s mother in Virginia couldn’t immediately be found.
“When we heard that he ran in and helped save other sailors from drowning, we said that was Gary. That was Gary to a T,” said Rehm’s friend Christopher Garguilo, of Hampton, Virginia. “He never thought about himself.”
Rehm was inspired to join the Navy by his grandfather, a World War II sailor who took Rehm on tours of military planes and ships when he was a youngster. Rehm enlisted in 1998, right after graduating from Oberlin High School, said his aunt.
“He loved what he did,” said the aunt, Virginia Rehm of Elyria. “He was a very kind-hearted, happy person who worked hard. It’s a big loss, it really is.”
After training in Illinois and San Diego, Rehm was stationed on the USS Ponce, which was deployed for a few months during the U. S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In 2004, Rehm was stationed in Virginia, where he lived with his wife until he was deployed to Japan on the USS Fitzgerald in 2015.
Rehm’s cousin Brad Rehm, of Elyria, said Gary Rehm would surprise his friends and family by being the first to call and wish them a happy birthday from Japan.
“He just called me out of the blue,” said Rehm, who last spoke to him when his cousin called him on his birthday in February. “He was just fun to be around. There was never a dull moment with him.”