Mom of fallen Marine Dylan Merola plans Gold Star memorial in Rancho Cucamonga

Sitting in the corner of a Rancho Cucamonga coffee shop as the morning light streamed in through a window, Cheryl Rex — the mother of fallen Marine Dylan Merola — smiled sadly when she explained plans for a Gold Star memorial for her son in their hometown.

“It’s not for Dylan,” Rex said as she glanced at her youngest child sitting beside her at the white bistro table. “It’s because of Dylan that I wanted something, but it’s not for him.”

Merola, a lance corporal, and 12 other service members died in the Aug. 26, 2021, suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, when the city was evacuated after the country fell to the Taliban.

Two other Inland Empire Marines, Kareem Nikoui, a lance corporal from Norco; and Cpl. Hunter Lopez, the son of Riverside County sheriff’s Deputy Alicia Lopez and Capt. Herman Lopez; also died in the bombing.

The Marines were posthumously awarded the Purple Heart.

A Gold Star Memorial honoring Merola and others that have died will break ground at 10 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 15, in Rancho Cucamonga’s Central Park.

The memorial is the fruit of a nonprofit group founded by Rex and her family. She called her work with the organization a way to honor her son. She can do nothing more for him now, but she can live her life the way he would.

“Dylan would give the shoes off his feet,” Rex said. “Dylan would give the shirt off his back.”

She’s not like Merola. Her focus was always her children, but said that her younger son would go without for someone else. He would help as many people as he could, she said.

“He was doing his job,” Rex said. “He was saving lives. He was bringing people to safety … So Dylan’s purpose? Dylan wanted the best for everybody else.”

Following his death, Rex began Legends Live Forever. The charity, based in Rancho Cucamonga where Rex and her children were raised, is small but growing, she said.

Aside from work on the memorial project, the group raises scholarship money in Merola’s name for Los Osos High School students experiencing hardships.

“I wanted to give everybody a purpose,” Rex said, referring to her family members. “Because my family was struggling and I felt that if I got them motivated to help others … in Dylan’s honor, it would give them meaning.”

Rex began privately collecting money for scholarships from friends, family and the community the year after Merola’s death. In 2022, she raised $1,000 for three scholarships at Los Osos, the Rancho Cucamonga school from which Merola graduated in 2019. Since then, the organization has raised $5,000 for students at the high school.

“All I know is to help others or guide them in a good path or give them something that maybe they don’t have at home,” Rex said. “Even if the $1,000 scholarship helps them get books or, you know, something for the future when they start.”

In 2023, she founded Legends Live Forever and started to raise money for a Gold Star Memorial. The organization is still taking contributions for the memorial with the goal of collecting $160,000 for the project. The term Gold Star refers to families from which a service member has died.

The memorial will be at Central Park, where the city held a 2023 ceremony honoring Merola. Legislation by Assemblymember James Ramos, D-San Bernardino, also renamed the Haven Avenue overpass off the 210 Freeway for Merola.

Creating the nonprofit group and learning to run it was a community effort and not something she could have done on her own, Rex said.

“It takes a village, right?” she said. “To raise everybody, and it takes a village to run our business.”

The city of Rancho Cucamonga granted land to Rex’s group for the memorial. The charity will pay for construction and then give the memorial to the city as a “gift,” Rex said.

She was inspired by the Woody Williams Foundation. The foundation, named for Hershel “Woody” Williams, a West Virginia Marine who fought in Iwo Jima during World War II and earned the Congressional Medal of Honor, seeks to build a Gold Star memorial in as many U.S. communities as possible.

Rex got Diversified Pacific to build a memorial for military members and first responders who have been killed or will be in years to come.

“I hope other people use it as a place to sit and think or honor whoever they’ve lost that’s close to them,” Rex said. “It’ll have a rose garden, some seating. So I’m hoping that people enjoy it.”

Rex’s journey has been a long and difficult path, but she and her family have found a way through by working for others.

The year after Merola’s death, Rex fell into a pattern.

She would wake up, take her youngest to school and spend the day sitting by her son’s grave at Forest Lawn in West Covina.

“I felt like I had no motivation to keep going … I felt like I was drowning,” Rex said. “All I knew what to do was go sit next to Dylan cause I didn’t know what to do.”

Rex’s mother encouraged her to honor her son at a time when Rex said all she wanted was to push everyone away and be alone.

“It was really hard, really hard,” Rex said. “You don’t know what to do. I never once expected my life to be this. I was just a mom working in Rancho, you know, in Rancho.”

Rex became a mother the week before her 19th birthday, and her children became her purpose. Life became guiding them, sharing experiences and watching them grow, she said.

“It’s not about you anymore, it’s about them and their future,” Rex said. “I was a young mom, so I didn’t ever really have a chance to focus on just me.”

Merola’s death was overwhelming, she said. Beyond losing her middle child, he died in a worldwide event that thrust her family into the spotlight.

Rex did what she knew. She focused on being a mom and on Merola’s purpose: helping others.

Marines that served with her son found a home in her house on weekends. Los Osos students found another scholarship. And her family found a purpose.

“And they don’t know it,” she said. “They helped me. They say I helped them, but they helped me. Mentally, everything, just being able to embrace them, be mom. My life was always with a bunch of kids in our home and it’s like it never … it didn’t stop right away.”

Being around those that had worked closely with Merola and being able to share stories about him and connect over their loss was healing for Rex and her daughter Olivia.

The Marines that filled her house have moved on, are getting married and starting their own families in their hometowns, but they keep in touch, she said.

She said that, at 5 years old, Merola watched shows centered on the military and ran around with Nerf guns playing pretend war with his brother and neighborhood boys.

“I had two of them — two boys — so you can imagine how my household was on a regular basis and I had all the neighborhood kids, they would run around the backyard,” Rex said.

She knew Merola would join the military but hoped that maybe she could talk him out of it. She signed paperwork allowing him to commit to the Marines over winter break of his senior year. He was 17. He spent six months training for the Marines before leaving for boot camp at 18.

Her oldest son, Brandon Merola, then enlisted six months after his brother died.

As for Legends Live Forever, it holds a 5K in Rancho Cucamonga every year to raise money for scholarships and the memorial.

“That’s been kind of a goal … to keep families motivated and do activities,” Rex said. “Go outside, go for a 5K. We’d love to grow. We would need more help because there is just a handful of us … We’d love support.”