A 23-year-old soldier from Salem known for his quiet determination was killed this weekend while trying to disarm a roadside bomb in Iraq.

Staff Sgt. Edmond Lo, who graduated from Salem High School in 2004, was killed Saturday in Samarra City. Lo, who turned down a three-year scholarship to a private university in favor of enlisting in the Army, was on his second tour of duty in Iraq.

He is the 29th soldier from New Hampshire - and the second this year - to die in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.

His family learned of his death early Saturday morning, when military officers came to their door and suggested his mother sit down.

"They start telling the story. Simple. Two sentences," Rosa Lo said yesterday. "They say Edmond was in Iraq, and a bomb accident. And then they say he was killed in the accident. He died in the accident.

"We were all in a dream," she said. "And we are all still in a dream."

Edmond Lo was the second youngest of her six children. Rosa Lo, who emigrated from Hong Kong with her husband 40 years ago and runs a computer repair service in Salem, said her son had considered accepting a three-year scholarship to Rochester Institute of Technology.

But Edmond Lo, who participated in ROTC at Salem High, had a "strong will" to join the military.

"That's what he wants to do. He's a tough guy, you know," his mother said. "I tried to pressure him, to go to college . . . but as a parent, you try not to interrupt him much. There's no sense I have to ask him to quit. He's a really smart guy."

Thomas Puzzo, a retired Air Force chief master sergeant and aerospace science instructor at Salem High, taught Edmond Lo during his junior and senior years. Lo commanded the drill team and color guard for the school's Air Force Junior ROTC program, Puzzo said, but he "had no airs about him."

He described Lo as a hard worker who was "very motivated, very dedicated, very dependable. You needed something done, Ed Lo was there. . . . It was always done and always done right."

Puzzo said he didn't know Lo's reason for enlisting.

"He didn't really talk about it a lot," Puzzo said, adding that Lo "wasn't the 9/11, gung ho type."

"I think it was a very personal thing to him," Puzzo said.

Ryan Oldeman, who graduated with Lo, said he was "a little surprised" to learn Lo had joined the military.

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