Loved ones: Green Run teens' lives filled with friends

VIRGINIA BEACH

Once the new-age music ended Tuesday afternoon at 17-year-old Adam Sherman's funeral service, mourners at Smith & Williams Funeral Home heard the whine of Jimi Hendrix's guitar emerge and the first notes of "All Along the Watchtower."

Sherman was a skilled guitar player. He was on his way to becoming a stonemason, not a musician, before he and two Green Run High School friends were killed Friday in a car accident.

Two hours later, across town at Hollomon-Brown Funeral Home, teenagers stood in line, whipped by a cold breeze, huddled with hoodies pulled up, wearing ballcaps, waiting to eulogize Matthew Kirkbride. Kirkbride, who had turned 18 just five days earlier, was driving Friday when his car slid across the middle of the road and was struck by a van, killing him, Sherman and Joseph Jenkins.

Separately, but together, moments of their lives were rewound and played again for those not there the first time. Coming home from the hospital after being born. First grade. Birthday parties. Pop Warner football. Middle school friends. Trips to the beach. Crazy hats, ubiquitous smiles, girlfriends come and girlfriends gone.

And then the gut-wrenching fast forward: The men they were about to become, but wouldn't.

During Sherman's service, four young men walked up to the lectern. One of them sucked in his breath, blew it out, then began to speak. Sherman was passionate about everything.

"He'd be talking about becoming a mason, and he would tell us in detail how he would do a project to perfection," Sherman's friend said.

Jimmy O'Toole walked to the mike. He and Adam were best friends, and by nature of family, Jimmy was also Adam's uncle. They were together in preschool, in first grade and again during junior and senior year of high school.

"I'll miss him a lot. He was a great person," Jimmy said, forcing out the words. "That's all I have to say."

Shawn O'Toole, Sherman's grandfather, remembered that a teacher once told him about the day Jimmy joined Adam's class at Salem Elementary.

"Adam got all excited, jumping up and down and saying, 'My uncle is here! My uncle is here!' " O'Toole recounted. "The teacher said, 'Where?' "

O'Toole said his grandson was not perfect. He broke some rules, but he was loyal.

"Adam and Jimmy shared many secrets, some of them Adam will take to his grave today," O'Toole said. "Some of them, 75 years from now, hopefully longer, Jimmy will do the same. I'm not sure what Jimmy will do without his buddy around."

At Kirkbride's funeral, Dennis Hobbs, a family friend, remembered holding Matthew as a baby and spending holidays with the family. He said Matthew didn't like turkey, and Hobbs figured he knew why.

"We fed him so much as a baby one time, in one of those attach-on seats," Hobbs remembered. "And he threw it all back at us and all over the floor."

Matthew was on his way to becoming an electrician and would help the neighborhood men with home projects without being asked, like the time he pitched in to replace Hobbs' kitchen countertops.

"Five old guys trying to get something that heavy into the house, and he was nice about it," Hobbs said, "because he could have probably carried it in himself."

Another family friend recalled talking to Matthew once, and listening as Matthew talked about this best friend, and that best friend and other best friends, and looking at him in wonder: "How do you have that many best friends?"

That's what Kirkbride was remembered for: being the thread that connected one group of friends to another, one branch of the family to the next, linking his family and friends.

Yet another friend walked up front, and said that Kirkbride would have relished the gathering.

"Today was a very important day for him," the friend said. "He didn't ever get the chance to have everybody together at one time."

Lon Wagner, (757) 446-2341, lon.wagner@pilotonline.com