HOUSE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION 59

(By Delegates Gearheart, Phillips, Butler, Ellington, McGeehan, Shott, O’Neal, Paynter and Longstreth)

[Introduced March 7, 2017]

Requesting the Division of Highways name the intersection of Athens Road and Thorn Street (Rt 20 and Rt 104) in Athens, Mercer County, the “USMC LCpl Timothy J. Dunnigan Memorial Intersection”.

Whereas, Lance Corporal Dunnigan was born on December 8, 1961, in Princeton; and

Whereas, Lance Corporal Dunnigan and 240 other military personnel lost their lives when a suicide bomber crashed a truck loaded with explosives through the front gates of the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, Oct. 23, 1983, during the Lebanese Civil War; and

Whereas, On October 23, 2016, when a memorial was unveiled in Princeton for those fallen heroes, Brian Meadows, who grew up with Lance Corporal Dunnigan, reminisced about his childhood with Dunnigan, “As a child he was such a wonderful, quiet person, but he loved adrenaline. He had a little go cart and he put a 350 car engine on it. And he was going around the neighborhood. And he stopped to talk to me. I said ‘Tim, what are you going to do man’. He said ‘I’m going to join the Marines man’. He said ‘I’m going to see you one day soon’. So afterwards, I found out that he was killed and it was just heartbreaking. Today, I drove a long way to get here for closure”; and

Whereas, Marine Corps League Event Coordinator Rod Mayberry helped lead the ceremony said, “We were asked a couple of months ago to try to put together a memorial for our very own here in Princeton, Timothy Dunnigan. We talked about it and thought about and we said if Timothy were here he wouldn’t want just the memorial for him”; and

Whereas, Mayberry described what happened at the Beirut bombings. “President Reagan sent a bunch of the Marines over there to keep two factions apart. To keep from having a civil war, to try and stop it and have a peaceful discussion. They set up a camp at the Beirut Airport. And no one had ever been attacked the way they had been attacked. There hadn’t been a 5 ton 12,000-pound bomb on anybody before. So on a Sunday morning at 6 a.m. this guy drove a truck through the building and detonated it”; and

Whereas, It is fitting and proper that Lance Corporal Dunnigan, be remembered and acknowledged for having given the ultimate sacrifice; therefore, be it

Resolved by the Legislature of West Virginia:

That the Division of Highways is hereby requested to name the intersection of Athens Road and Thorn Street (Rt 20 and Rt 104) in Athens, Mercer County, the “USMC LCpl Timothy J. Dunnigan Memorial Intersection”; and, be it

Further Resolved, That the Commissioner of the Division of Highways is hereby requested to erect signs at all four entrances to that intersection containing bold and prominent letters proclaiming the bridge the “USMC LCpl Timothy J. Dunnigan Memorial Intersection”; and, be it

Further Resolved, That the Clerk of the House of Delegates, forward a certified copy of this concurrent resolution to the Secretary of the Department of Transportation.