UPDATED: Colonel killed in Iraq had family in O’Fallon
A St. Louis-born U.S. Army colonel was killed in Iraq Sunday, according to his sister, Kathleen King of O’Fallon.
Col. Stephen K. Scott, 54, was serving at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad where he was working with Iraqi leaders on weapons intelligence and defense. Scott, who was an avid runner, was in the workout facilities in the green zone when he was killed during a mortar attack, King said.
Scott had spent two-thirds of his life serving in the military, joining the army at age 18. From then, the military, fast cars and family became the focus on his life, said his daughter Rebekah Scott, 22.
"Military and cars," she said. "That’s how I’ll remember him."
After basic training, Stephen Scott worked at the Army Aviation and Troop Command facility on Goodfellow Boulevard in St. Louis until it was closed in 1997. He then moved to Huntsville, Ala., where he served at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal facility.
In Huntsville he kept a large collection of cars and motorcycles. From the time he was young he loved to drive his cars fast, family members said. By October 2005, he was in Washington, D.C., working at the Pentagon.
Family members last saw Stephen Scott during Thanksgiving. He left for his second tour in Iraq a few weeks later.
"He was proud of his work," King said. "Proud of how the Iraqis were responding to him, proud of the Iraqi friends he had made."
Scott’s family kept in touch with him almost daily by phone, a luxury not all military families have, King said. For a long time, all of his news from Iraq was good, she said. He was doing well. But in the past few weeks, she said, he told her everyone was in full bulletproof attire because of a series of missile attacks on the green zone.
Then she didn’t get her usual Saturday morning phone call from Stephen. And his mother, Patricia Scott, didn’t get her Sunday morning call, either.
"I tried to convince myself all day that the phone lines were down, and then two men knocked at the door," King said.
Stephen Scott was scheduled to retire from active duty in June and return home just in time for his grandson Dylan’s first birthday.
King was looking forward to taking a trip with him after he returned.
"He thought he was invincible," she said. "In fact, he told me to get my passport so we could go to Barbados when he got home. So I have my passport but I don’t have a buddy to go to Barbados."
Stephen Scott is survived by two daughters, Rachel Regot and Rebekah Scott; his mother, Patricia Scott; one sister, Kathleen King; one brother, Mark Scott; and three grandchildren.
Services will be at Stygar Mid Rivers Funeral Home, but the family had not yet set a date.
