Vienna man saw Kosovo police job as 'challenge'

VIENNA, Ill. -- A Vienna man who died from wounds sustained in Kosovo was remembered as a man who enjoyed his job with the United Nations' international police force.

Gary Weston, 52, died Saturday at St. Louis University Medical Center, two days after he was returned to the United States in critical condition. He suffered two gunshot wounds to the head earlier this month when the convoy he was riding in came under attack in Kosovo.

"He certainly didn't have to go, but he wanted to," Johnson County Commissioner Rick Nannie said. "This was something he enjoyed doing. ... Gary saw this as another challenge, I think."

Before retiring, he had worked at the Shawnee Correctional Center.

"Through my years with corrections I'd worked with him all the way up until he retired, which was up until a couple of years ago," Nannie said. "Gary was a very good person. There's no doubt about that."

Nannie said Weston was always happy to help with whatever needed doing, such as getting policies and procedures put into place at work. He said he talked with Weston about a week before he left for Kosovo.

Johnson County Commissioner Jim Haney said he worked with Weston for 16 or 17 years. He spent part of Saturday night in a church service at Grace United Methodist Church in Carbondale, Ill., where prayers were said for Weston's family.

"This is going to be a loss you can never replace, but they're going to be able to draw upon the strength they have to make it through this," Haney said.

Weston and Kim Bigley, who oversaw the Shawnee Correctional Center until last year, were among 21 U.S. correctional officers leaving an orientation session at a prison in the northern city of Kosovska Mitrovica when a Jordanian officer, Sgt. Maj. Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim Ali, opened fire on their convoy.

The 10-minute shootout that followed killed Bigley, 47, and Lynn Williams, 48, of Elmont, N.Y., and the gunman, and wounded 11 others, including Weston.

About 200 people gathered Sunday at Calvary Baptist Church in this White Hall in western Illinois to remember Bigley.

Authorities are investigating whether Ali had links to the Palestinian militant group Hamas, a senior NATO official said Saturday.

Bigley had worked for the Corrections Department for 20 years. Weston worked for the department for 29 years before retiring recently, his family said.

The corrections officers were part of an effort to bring professional corrections expertise into the prisons in Kosovo. Since the United Nations took control of the province in 1999, the prisons have been supervised by police with little specialized training.

The world body moved into Kosovo after a 78-day NATO air war launched to stop former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's crackdown on independence-minded ethnic Albanians.

The officers had arrived in Kosovo April 7 and hadn't yet begun the policing jobs they had gone there to do.