Mississippi honours Marine plane crash victims with memorial

Mississippi honours Marine plane crash victims with memorial | iNFOnews.ca
-In this July 11, 2017 file photograph, a Mississippi Highway Patrol trooper uses his cell phone while guarding the road to a restricted area north of U.S. Highway 82, near a site that has part of the wreckage of a U.S. Marine KC-130T military transport, that crashed in a soybean field near Itta Bena, Miss. Several family and friends are expected to attend the Saturday, July 14, 2018 unveiling of a memorial near the crash site, built in their honor.(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

ITTA BENA, Miss. – Mississippi and U.S. Marine Corps officials helped dedicate a monument to a plane crash that killed 15 Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman last year.

The military transport plane, flown by a New York-based Marine Reserve unit, was going from North Carolina to California for training when it crashed July 10, 2017.

The Greenwood Commonwealth reports that relatives and friends of the 16 crash victims gathered Saturday for ceremonies at Mississippi Valley State University and the nearby memorial.

Marines unveiled the memorial, which displays an image of the plane set in granite and surrounded in a circle by the engraved names of the fallen.

About 30 people then set off on a 900-mile (1,450-kilometre) relay to Marine Corps Special Operations Command at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

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