Widow of Fallen Marine Rylee McCollum Gives Birth to Baby Girl, Levi Rylee Rose

The widow of U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Rylee McCollum, who was one of 13 servicemembers killed in a terror attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, last month, gave birth Monday to a baby girl, Levi Rylee Rose, at Camp Pendleton in California.

As Breitbart News reported last month:

Rylee McCollum, a 20-year-old 2019 graduate of Jackson, Wyoming’s Jackson Hole High School, has been identified as one of the U.S. servicemembers killed in Thursday’s suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where U.S. evacuation efforts were underway.

According to reports, this was McCollum’s first deployment to Afghanistan. He “was reportedly manning a checkpoint at the airport when the bomb went off,” according to the [Casper] Star-Tribune. His older sister, Roice McCollum, said her brother always wanted to be a Marine.

“He wanted to be a Marine his whole life and carried around his rifle in his diapers and cowboy boots,” she said. “He was determined to be in infantry… Rylee wanted to be a history teacher and a wrestling coach when he finished serving his country.”

“He’s a tough, kind, loving kid who made an impact on everyone he met. His joke and wit brought so much joy,” she continued.

Rylee’s father, Jim McCollum, told Brian Kilmeade of the Fox News Channel that he declined to meet with President Joe Biden at the dignified transfer ceremony for the remains of the fallen servicemembers:

JIM MCCOLLUM: I actually declined to meet with the president. We went to a different room. When he came, we went to a separate room. I had no desire to meet with the president.

KILMEADE: Why?

MCCOLLUM: The way he was handled this, everything he’s done, every step along the way, has been absolutely backwards and I don’t understand the process of how, how they came to the decisions that they made. A high school kid could make better decisions than they’ve made in this. They have fumbled the ball every step of the way.

A GoFundMe page for McCollum’s unborn daughter quickly raised over $500,000, and has raised nearly $700,000 thus far.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.