The Rodriguez Memorial Interchange

This interchange, where Interstate Ten meets Interstate Twenty-Five, carries the name of Sergeant First Class Antonio Rey Rodriguez, known to friends as Rod. He grew up here in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the Mesilla Valley, and enlisted in the Army in the fall of two thousand nine. Over the next decade he deployed to Afghanistan roughly ten times, first with the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and later as a Green Beret with the Seventh Special Forces Group.

On February eighth, two thousand twenty, he was killed in Nangarhar Province, in what early reports described as an insider attack. He was twenty-eight years old. He was posthumously promoted and awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

In two thousand twenty-three, led by his mother, the state renamed this interchange in his honor.