The Real Life and Tragic End of Private Roy Cobb | Band of Brothers [15:11-20:17]

It's unknown what he was in jail for and whether drinking was involved in his arrest. However, it appears that his marriage possibly started to break down around this time or shortly after. Sometime around 1953, for reasons unknown, Roy Cobb moved to California. It is unclear if his family went with him or if he and his wife separated at this point. However, in his obituary, just over 10 years later, Marie is not mentioned as someone he was survived by, nor is she the one who filled out the application form for a veteran's headstone which was completed by his mother. Likewise, when Marie died at age 86 in 2012, Roy was not mentioned as one of the family members she was preceded in death by. This leads me to believe that they did separate or divorce around the time he went to California. Marie subsequently moved to Michigan, attended community college, and became a physical therapist. She worked as an LPN and physical therapist at Bayer Memorial Hospital in Ipsilanti where she lived. She retired at age 83 just three years before her death. She kept the name Marie Cobb and appears to have never remarried. Roy Cobb was living in California for just over a decade before tragedy struck on April 23, 1964. According to the Sacramento Bee, evidence showed that four men, including Roy Cobb, had been drinking whiskey that afternoon. They got into a car driven by one of the men, 36-year-old Kenneth Feddy. An article in the Berkeley Gazette stated that Feddy was intoxicated and got into a heated argument with another man in the car, 26-year-old Frank Essick, who was also drunk. Feddy pulled off the road so they could fight, and in doing so ran over a nearly three-foot high reflector-type marker on the side of Alcorn Road about eight miles north of Sacramento. The car stalled on top of the signpost. After Feddy and Essick had it out on the side of the road, the men then tried to get the car unstuck from on top of the post. Kenneth Feddy got back behind the wheel, and the other three men, including Roy Cobb, began pushing the vehicle to dislodge it from the signpost. Cobb and a 23-year-old man named Barry Dyer were pushing from behind, and Frank Essick was pushing on one side. For reasons unknown, Feddy shifted the car into reverse, presumably to try to dislodge it. Suddenly, the car shot backward in sideways into a steep drainage ditch, pinning Barry Dyer underneath, and Roy Cobb between the bumper and the wall of the ditch. Both Cobb and Dyer suffered crush chests and internal injuries and died before reaching Sacramento Hospital by ambulance. Roy Cobb was just 42 years old and had been a farm worker at the time. The driver Kenneth Feddy was booked in the county jail on suspicion of drunk driving and felony manslaughter. The police had been seeking Feddy for some time on a traffic warrant for his arrest for driving with a suspended license. He was sentenced to prison the following month for involuntary manslaughter. A probation report revealed that Feddy had an extensive record of previous arrests for intoxication, including three arrests for drunk driving. He had also been arrested in 1959 for purse-natching. And despite his negligent actions that resulted in the deaths of Roy Cobb and Barry Dyer, Feddy was arrested for drunk driving several years later in June 1969 and sentenced the six months in jail. He was then again arrested for drunk driving in 1971 and once again ordered a jail time. Roy Cobb's body was transferred back to his hometown and he was laid to rest in odd fellow cemetery in Pineville, Kentucky. Of all the band of brothers veterans I've researched, Roy Cobb's story was the hardest to sort out. Much of the information online, including in articles and videos, leads back to Stephen Ambrose's book or the series itself as the source. Of the 16 books I have on easy company and its members, most mentioned Roy Cobb very little or not at all. While others draw mainly from Ambrose, most helpful was David Kenning Webster's book, Parachute Infantry, and to some degree, Clancy Lyles' biography, Silver Eagle. A debt of gratitude is owed to the Reddit user, W.B. Gamer, whose extensive research in the Cobb has helped to restore his legacy. Much of their well-documented research provided the groundwork for this video, which I was then able to expand upon. Sadly, like Herbert Sobel, Norman Dyke, and Albert Blythe, Roy Cobb was a victim of shoddy research by Stephen Ambrose and a lack of fact-checking by the band of brothers screenwriters. As a result, Roy Cobb was maligned by both Ambrose and the series. In the end, from what we know about Cobb's true story, he was a good combat soldier who was generally well-liked by the men, except when he was drunk. Like many soldiers, he had issues with alcohol, but he was likely never court-martialed because of it, nor was he discharged over his real-life drunken incident in Hagenau.