Award-Winning Journalist Leroy Sievers Dead At 53

August 17, 2008 10:19 a.m. EST

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - National Public Radio commentator and award-winning journalists Leroy Sievers is dead of cancer at 53.

The Peabody Award-winning journalist who spent the early years of his 25-year career covering wars and natural disasters in more than a dozen countries. He worked 10 years for CBS news and then spent years of his career at ABC working on news show Nightline. He covered the 2003 Iraq War as an embedded journalist with United States forces.

After he was diagnosed with cancer, he chronicled his battles with the disease for NPR in on air broadcasts as well as in a blog online.

Over the years, Sievers won numerous awards including Emmys for national news and two George Foster Peabody Awards.

He was treated for colon cancer in 2001, but cancer returned four years later and had spread to his brain and lungs. Sievers lived far longer than doctors had first predicted, but he died Friday. Sievers is survived by his wife Laurie Singer