A Marine died in a freak parachute accident during a dream vacation to Australia his wife had won on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. 
 
 Brandon McGraw, 33, was killed in Euroa on Saturday afternoon when, on coming down for a landing, he suddenly veered left and right and slammed into the ground. 
 
 The last image of Brandon McGraw before his jump that ended with his shocking death. (Cherilyn McGraw via Facebook) 
 
 The Afghan and Iraq war veteran, who’d watched his wife Cherilyn safely perform a tandem jump with an instructor seconds before, went into cardiac arrest. 
 
 Brandon McGraw takes a photo of himself on the plane just before his jump. (Cherilyn McGraw via Facebook) 
 
 He was pronounced dead at the scene 12:30 p.m. 
 
 Cherilyn McGraw on the Ellen show. (Cherilyn McGraw via YouTube/NBC) 
 
 Gunnery sergeant McGraw was based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. The couple was from Huntington and married in Nov. 2011. 
 
 Cherilyn McGraw competed and went on to win a contest that earned her the trip to Australia. (Cherilyn McGraw via YouTube/NBC) 
 
 His wife won the “Stuff Your Down Under Pants” contest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Jan. 16 last year, the Jacksonville Daily News reported. She took home a trip for two to Australia. 
 
 Cherilyn McGraw and husband Brandon McGraw were married in 2011. (Brandon McGraw via Facebook) 
 
 The duo finally took advantage of the prize this month, flying to the southern hemisphere — with a stop-over in New York City — at the weekend. 
 
 Cherilyn McGraw with her late husband, who was a Marine who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as he returned home from his military service. 
 
 Capt. Barry Morris, of Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, told WTKR McGraw was an extreme sports enthusiast with “many” skydive jumps under his belt. 
 
 Undated photo of Brandon McGraw in Afghanistan. 
 
 McGraw’s special education teacher Cherilyn wife paid tribute to her husband on Facebook. 
 
 Cherilyn McGraw with her husband Brandon McGraw on their wedding day. 
 
 Calling him her “hero” and “angel,” she uploaded the haunting final photo of him smiling on board the plane just moment before jumping. 
 
 “These are truly such symbolic photos,” she wrote. 
 
 “He was happy and doing what he loved. It’s amazing all that photos can capture in a moments time … I love you more than anything in the world, honey. You are the most amazing man,” she added. 
 
 The Euroa Skydive school, based near Melbourne, Victoria, is now investigating the incident - the first fatality in its 30-year history. ||||| Lejeune Marine dies skydiving in Australia with his wife 
 
 A 33-year-old Camp Lejeune Marine died Saturday afternoon while skydiving with his wife in Australia — a trip she won in a competition on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in January. 
 
 He crashed into the ground after a flawless descent that ended with unexplained complications that remain under investigation. 
 
 Brandon McGraw, 33, of Hampstead died in Euroa, Australia — which is in Melbourne, Victoria — while skydiving with his wife, Cherilyn McGraw, a special education teacher at Topsail Elementary School. 
 
 McGraw recently had returned from Afghanistan, and while his rank was not known at press time, photos on his Facebook page depict a man fond of extreme sports who was skilled at climbing and skydiving. 
 
 The couple was jumping with members of Euroa Skydive, an Australian skydiving school. 
 
 Ian Matthews, who works at Euroa Skydive, told The Daily News that Brandon was an experienced skydiver with more than “a few jumps under his belt.” 
 
 “McGraw watched his wife do a tandem jump before exiting the plane,” Matthews said. “He floated for three or four minutes with a good canopy. ||||| In this Monday, July 25, 2016 photo, skydiver Luke Aikins prepares his parachute during his training in Simi Valley, Calif. After months of training, this elite skydiver says he's ready to leave his chute... (Associated Press) 
 
 In this Monday, July 25, 2016 photo, skydiver Luke Aikins prepares his parachute during his training in Simi Valley, Calif. After months of training, this elite skydiver says he's ready to leave his chute in the plane when he bails out 25,000 feet above Simi Valley on Saturday. That's right, no parachute,... (Associated Press) 
 
 SIMI VALLEY, Calif. (AP) — He's made 18,000 parachute jumps, helped train some of the world's most elite skydivers, done some of the stunts for "Ironman 3." But the plunge Luke Aikins knows he'll be remembered for is the one he's making without a parachute. Or a wingsuit. 
 
 Or anything, really, other than the clothes he'll be wearing when he jumps out of an airplane at 25,000 feet this weekend, attempting to become the first person to land safely on the ground in a net. 
 
 The Fox network will broadcast the two-minute jump live at 8 p.m. EDT (5 p.m. PDT) Saturday as part of an hour-long TV special called "Heaven Sent." 
 
 And, no, you don't have to tell Aikins it sounds crazy. He knows that. 
 
 He said as much to his wife after a couple Hollywood guys looking to create the all-time-greatest reality TV stunt floated the idea by him a couple years ago. 
 
 "I said, 'You won't believe these guys,'" the affable skydiver recalls with a robust laugh. "'They want me to jump out without a parachute.' She said, 'Oh, with a wingsuit.' I said, 'No, they want me to do it with nothing.' We both had a good laugh about that." 
 
 But in the weeks that followed he couldn't shake one persistent thought: Could anybody actually do this and live to tell the tale? 
 
 Because if anyone could, Aikins wanted to be that guy. 
 
 After all, the 42-year-old daredevil has practically lived his life in the sky. He made his first tandem jump when he was 12, following with his first solo leap four years later. He's been racking them up at about 800 a year ever since. 
 
 He took his wife, Monica, on her first jump when they were dating and she's up to 2,000 now. The couple lives with a 4-year-old son, Logan, in Washington, where Aikins' family owns Skydive Kapowsin near Tacoma. 
 
 Over the years Aikins has taught skydiving, taught others to teach skydiving, even participated in world-record stacking events, those exercises where skydivers line up atop one another as they fly their open chutes across the sky. 
 
 He tells of having his chute tangle with others on a couple of those efforts and having to come down under his reserve parachute. In all, he's used his reserve 30 times, not a bad number for 18,000 jumps. 
 
 This time, though, he won't have any parachute. 
 
 "If I wasn't nervous I would be stupid," the compact, muscular athlete says with a grin as he sits under a canopy near Saturday's drop zone. 
 
 "We're talking about jumping without a parachute, and I take that very seriously. It's not a joke," he adds. 
 
 Nearby, a pair of huge cranes defines the boundaries where the net in which Aikins expects to land is being erected. It will be about one-third the size of a football field and 20 stories high, providing enough space to cushion his fall, he says, without allowing him to bounce out of it. The landing target, which has been described as similar to a fishing trawler net, has been tested repeatedly using dummies. 
 
 One of those 200-pound (91-kilogram) dummies didn't bounce out. It crashed right through. 
 
 "That was not a good thing to see," recalled Jimmy Smith, the veteran Hollywood public relations man who, with his partner Bobby Ware, sold Fox on the idea of having someone skydive without a parachute. 
 
 Chris Talley, who had worked with Aikins on other projects and helped train him for this one, proposed the parachute -free idea to Smith, creative director for Amusement Park Entertainment, telling him Aikins was arguably the only guy who was not only good enough but also smart enough and careful enough to survive such a feat. 
 
 Smith recalled how the three men gazed at each other with a look of foreboding after that dummy crashed through the net. Then they looked over at Aikins. 
 
 "Luke just said, 'No biggie, that's why we test.'" 
 
 Fox has had little to say about the stunt other than it will be broadcast on a tape delay, as is the case with all its live broadcasts, says network spokesman Les Eisner. It contains a warning not to try this at home. 
 
 That would seemingly be difficult, as Smith and Ware had to scour a good part of the world, from Arizona Indian land to Dubai real estate, before they found what everyone agreed was the best place for Aikins to land. 
 
 He'll come down in a dry, dusty, desolate-looking section of an old movie ranch north of Los Angeles where not that long ago Shia LaBeouf was battling "Transformers." 
 
 The drop zone, surrounded by rolling hills, presents some challenges, Aikins said, noting he'll be constantly fighting shifting winds as he falls 120 mph (193 kph). 
 
 Other skydivers have jumped from planes without parachutes and had someone hand them one in midair. But Aikins won't even have that. 
 
 Why? 
 
 "To me, I'm proving that we can do stuff that we don't think we can do if we approach it the right way," he answers. 
 
 "I've got 18,000 jumps with a parachute, so why not wear one this time?" he muses almost to himself. "But I'm trying to show that it can be done."
– A Marine and his wife were in Australia last week on a trip they won on Ellen DeGeneres' show in January, but it ended in tragedy when the Marine was killed in a skydiving accident. Cherilyn McGraw made a tandem jump in Euroa, north of Melbourne, on Saturday, but husband Brandon had skydiving experience and jumped solo, the Daily News reports. Something went wrong with his parachute 300 feet from the ground, causing him to twist and turn and ultimately crash; he went into cardiac arrest and died at the scene. An employee of Euroa Skydive says Brandon had more than "a few jumps under his belt," as well as training and documentation, and that most of his jump went flawlessly. Australian media have cited high winds as a possible factor. McGraw, 33, had recently come back from a deployment in Afghanistan, and was also an Iraq war veteran, the New York Daily News reports. His wife, a special education teacher in their home state of North Carolina, won the trip by competing in a "Stuff Your Down Under Pants" contest on Ellen, managing to stuff the most balls into a large pair of pants. McGraw's Facebook page shows he was a fan of extreme sports including skydiving, and a Marine Corps captain confirms to confirms to WCTI that McGraw was highly trained. Following his death, Cherilyn posted pictures to Facebook taken moments before her husband's jump, saying he "was happy and doing what he loved" when he died.