Trump signs bill renaming Warrenville post office after Army veteran killed in Iraq
A move 13 years in the making, President Donald Trump has signed a resolution naming the Warrenville post office for a 20-year-old Army medic killed in Iraq.
The Warrenville post office, at 3S101 Rockwell St., will now be known as the Cpl. Jeffery Allen Williams Post Office Building. The White House says Trump signed House Resolution 4407 on Friday.
Earlier this year, high school classmates of Williams revived a request originally made by his mother to designate the post office in honor of her 20-year-old son, mortally wounded by an improvised explosive device in northwestern Iraq in September 2005.
U.S. Rep. Randy Hultgren, a Plano Republican, wrote the bill to rename the building. All 17 other members of the state's congressional delegation co-sponsored the bill that was referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and eventually signed by Trump on Friday.
Williams, a 2003 Wheaton Warrenville South High School graduate, was well-known around the post office, where he mailed bills and ran errands for his mom, who has a congenital heart defect. Inspired by her condition, Williams once aspired to become a cardiologist.
Sandra Williams Smith, who moved to Texas in 2004, first sought to have the post office bear her son's name in the weeks after his death. In 2007, Pat Quinn, then the lieutenant governor, indicated he backed the idea but noted the red tape surrounding the renaming of a federal building.
Williams' old classmates, took up the cause again, and learned Hultgren would need to draft the bill because the post office falls within the 14th Congressional District. Hultgren also wanted to see whether there was community support for the proposal.
Williams' friends delivered and then some. In addition to starting an online petition that garnered more than 1,300 signatures, they got Winfield Township on board with a resolution endorsing the renaming.
Daily Herald Staff Writer Katlyn Smith contributed to this report.