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WASHINGTON - Petty Officer 2nd Class David Sean Roddy was offered a temporary leave from Iraq to recuperate after seeing his partner blown up by a homemade bomb in late August.

Roddy, 32, of Abingdon, refused. "I have a job to do, and I'm staying here with my team," he told his superiors, according to his mother, Carol Roddy, also of Abingdon.

"That's just the kind of guy he was," the sailor's mother said. "He knew he had a job to do, and he stayed over there and sacrificed everything."

Three weeks later, on Sept. 16, Roddy was killed when insurgents remotely detonated a bomb near his vehicle in Al Anbar province, his mother said. Roddy, an explosive disposal technician, was responding to reports of another bomb that insurgents used as bait.

Before he could get close, another bomb buried deeply so that the unit's instruments could not detect it exploded, killing him, Carol Roddy said.

"He was a great guy," she said. "He was described as a hero."

Roddy, a graduate of Harford Community College, joined the Navy in November 1999. After four years of working with computers, he shifted specialties, completing Navy Ordinance Disposal School in April 2005. He was assigned to Explosive Ordinance Disposal Unit Two a month later.

After Roddy's friend, Chief Petty Officer Paul J. Darga, 34, was killed last month, he had called more often, his wife, Cristale Roddy, of Hampton, Va., told the Associated Press. He told his wife that he was excited to see her and their three children, ages 7 to 10.

Services will be at 10 a.m. today at St. Francis de Sales Church, 1450 Abingdon Road, Abingdon.

Burial will be private.

Copyright © 2006 University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism