Army Specialist Patrick L. Lay II

I would like to feel that a lot of that had to do with our strong faith that we had—my father’s influence. He was very witty, yet very strong, yet compassionate. And that had a lot to do with my father investing in him and being there for him in a time of his life where his world kind of fell apart at a very young age.

So I believe that a lot of it—and my father was a minister at the time, he pastored the church—Life Covenant Sanctuary, there in Bradenton, he was a pastor there. So, you know he did a lot with them. I had to work as a single mom, so my parents had them all the time as I was working. So he got to be really close to ministry, and I think a lot of that just poured into him, basically, as far as his character, how you treat people, how you want to make a difference, how you’re always looking out for others—so that I attribute a lot of that to the man he became.

He went to Community Christian for his elementary years. His middle school, he went to Gulf Coast Christian. And for high school, he went in in tenth grade at Braden River.

I think for him, because he had always been in a private school, in a smaller setting, so acclimating to larger classrooms, a larger school—he enjoyed it a lot. He went right away into their football program—started through their football program right away. But he enjoyed, I guess, a larger scene of kids to interact with.

He worked for Come See Come Sav during his high school years. He loved the beach, and he loved paintball—did a lot of paintballing in his teenage years, out 64, right past the interstate, and the little local one that was over around off of Crusoe Road or there was a place—a home there—that had a paintball field. He loved hunting out in Myakka.

Of course, he loved football. I think football probably stemmed from his dad, who played football at Southeast High School. So he was always wanting to do that and follow in his dad’s footsteps, and so they also allowed him to wear the same number that his dad wore. He wore number eighty-five, so he wore that number, so that was kind of a cool thing to him, that he could have that type of connection. So he enjoyed sports—he was involved with the weightlifting team as well at Braden River.

He loved fishing—my father introduced him to fishing, and they would always fish together. Also once my dad moved into their mobile home park there—Orange Grove, I believe, was the name of it—and they have a few little lakes back there, and they would go fishing all the time in those lakes as well—and the beach, of course.

He was stateside after his boot camp for about a year—a little over a year—before he was deployed, and that kind of was a little prayer of mine, because he was just 19 years old when he enlisted, so I was praying that he did not get deployed right out of going through boot camp. I just felt, you know, as a mother, that’s too much.

I wanted him to have a little bit more experience and training before he had to go really into that type of war, but he was making the best of it. Every person that you speak to that he was connected with always said that his attitude, and his wit that he always had—they said he always brought life into any bad situation that we were having over there.

He was involved in an I.E.D. prior to the one that took his life, and that was in April, shortly after he was deployed over there, and unfortunately one of his buddies right behind him lost his life. So that hit him extremely hard, yet they tell me—he ended up with a concussion on that particular incident—and they tell me he did not want to come back to the stateside.

He wanted to hurry up, recoup, be able to go back to his team—because he was a team leader as well. So he wanted to get back into the field to his men, basically, he said, “I just want to get back to my guys.”