Here's how the Four Friends Memorial Came to Be...
Just as many of these initiatives begin, our story opens with a tragedy. Early in the morning on February 9th, 2008, four friends spent the night in a house they were renovating. They planned to get an early start after working late the prior evening. A gentle snow fell, and they put a generator in an attached mudroom to furnish them with electricity. They were on the second floor and 60 feet away where they fell asleep, and never woke up.
The scene that night was something straight out of a television crime show. The road was closed and lined with emergency vehicles. Personnel in gas masks ran around while the police took pictures. A thousand conversations and activities whirred by but somehow the world was frozen in a surreal haziness. Then the media picked up the story and the phone calls began coming in. A true nightmare began to unfold as the cold evening air settled.
As the news made it to each family, worlds were changed in the blink of an eye. What started as a normal winter evening became something earth-shattering for a community. Four young men with promising futures had become a memory. As the weeks turned into months, Mike Hopkins’ sister became increasingly distraught to learn that the cause of the boys’ death, carbon monoxide, is completely preventable. Had the home had a $20 CO detector, the young men would have had a chance to escape. As it was, they had no warning as to what was happening. They simply went to sleep and never woke up.nnThe tragedy was too much to bear. Learning that their home state, Pennsylvania, has one of the highest CO death rates since 1999 and lacked legislation, Watt decided to work towards legislation in honor of four friends who would never grow old.nnAnd so the Four Friends Memorial came to be…