According to his mother, the bereaved brother of a Marine who was killed by a suicide bomber during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan last year committed suicide close to a memorial for his younger sibling.
Just a few days before the anniversary of the strike that killed his brother, Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, 20, and a dozen other US troops at Kabul Airport as scared Afghans rushed to flee the Taliban, Dakota Halverson, 28, committed suicide in California.
The men’s mother, Shana Chappell, revealed to friends that Dakota had “been talking a lot lately about how he just wants to be with Kareem, how much he misses him.”
“My son Dakota visited his brother Kareem this morning,”
The bereaved mother later posted about her new loss, which she had earlier attributed on President “Biden’s incompetence, ignorance, and him being a traitor,” blaming it on the “ripple effect” of the fatal US withdrawal.
Before his death last week, “Dakota had been expressing some of the things that had been bothering him and one of those things was the loss of his brother Kareem and how he just wanted to be with him again,” their mom wrote.
“He was still having a hard time believing he was actually gone.
“He’d sneak into the cemetery at night and sleep on Kareem’s resting place. He took his life across from a permanent memorial we have here in town for his brother Kareem,” she wrote.
The “Fallen 13” memorial garden in Norco that was made public earlier this year appears to be what the mother was alluding to. However, in addition to his graveside memorial stone, the town’s post office was renamed the Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui Memorial Post Office last month in his honour.
The mother, who previously claimed she was harassed online for criticising Biden, said, “I’m not going to make this a political post but this is the ripple effect!”
My children have recently lost another brother. Dakota’s friends have lost a great friend, and my family has lost another devoted family member!
