PAX Centurion - Special Edition 2013

Page 20 • PAX CENTURION • Special Boston Marathon Bombing Issue 2013 617-989-BPPA (2772) MITOfficer always looked out for others By Kevin Cullen, Boston Globe W hen he was 6 years old, Sean Collier was sitting in a booth at a Papa Gino’s with his mother, Kelley, and his little brother Andy, having a pizza. There was a woman in another booth, alone, and she was crying. “Mum,” Sean Collier whispered, leaning across the table, “you’ve got to go talk to that lady.” Kelley looked over at the woman and tried to reassure her son. “Sean,” she said, “I’m sure she just wants to be alone.” “Maybe she has no one,” Sean replied. “You’re a nurse, mum. Please go talk to her.” Her conscience nudged by a 6-year-old boy, Kelley walked over to the woman and asked if she was OK. On Monday morning, as they prepared to bury their brother, the siblings of Sean Collier, the MIT police officer murdered by inexplicable hatred, asked me to listen to what they call Sean stories. They knew that people all over the world knew Sean was a dedicated, compassionate police of- ficer. But they wanted people to know about the 27-year-old who was a loyal brother, a dutiful son, a doting uncle. They wanted people to know that in a sprawling family that grew up in a sprawling house inWilmington, the second youngest of six kids was their moral compass. That the internal question asked so often by Joe Rogers, his wife, and their kids was, “What would Sean do?” When he was a little boy, from the age of 3 or 4, Sean was obsessed with the American flag. He drew it constantly. With crayons. With pencils. With magic mark- ers. And then he’d hand them out to family, friends, and total strangers. From a tender age, he was an entrepre- neur. He would gather rocks, paint them vibrant colors, then set them out a table on Lorin Drive and try to sell them. “Sean,” his brothers and sisters told him, “no one is going to buy a painted rock.” But he was irrepressible, and some people in the neighborhood couldn’t resist the earnest young Collier kid. They bought his rocks. His sister Jenn Rogers and he were close in age, and they were inseparable as kids. They sat together on the big recliner in the living room, brother and sister, and they’d build forts with blankets draped across furniture. Andy Collier looked up to his big brother Sean. Once, when Andy went to step on an ant in their kitchen, Sean stopped him. “You can’t kill it,” 7-year-old Sean Collier told his brother. “It’s a living thing. Pick it up with a napkin and put it outside.” Jennifer Lemmerman was always close to her brother Sean but they really bonded one summer, when Sean was in high school and Lemmerman was in college. They shared a summer job at a medical office in which they had to transfer a series of medical records into a computer system. To pass the time, they listened to the radio, and at one point the station ran a fund-raiser for the Jimmy Fund. Sean was transfixed by the stories of little kids get- ting cancer and getting better. “Sean was so profoundly affected by those stories,” his sister said. “He went home that night and made a donation. He was in high school. He didn’t have any money, but he set up an automatic with- drawal from his bank account. He had that automatic withdrawal until the day he died.” His big brother Rob Rogers was in awe when Sean helped a family that lives down the street. The father had a stroke. The son got in an accident and lost his leg. “He was in the police academy, paying his own way, but somehow Sean scraped together $1,000 for that family,” Rob Rog- ers said. “I still don’t know how he did it.” Sean’s sister, Nicole Lynch, was the oldest and the first of the siblings to have children. When her oldest, 5-year-old Kailey, com- plained about getting glasses, saying it would make her look awk- ward, Uncle Sean came over for a visit. “You look beautiful in those glasses,” he told his niece. “They make you look smart.” Kailey smiled, and her uncle handed her a case that he had used SeanCollierwas second oldest of six children andhis family’smoral compass. Clockwise fromlower left, siblings Andrew Collier, Nicole Lynch, Sean Collier, Jennifer Lemmerman, Jenn Rogers and Rob Rogers posed for a family photo. MIT Police Officer Sean Collier