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SnapGlow.TV: Modern Gems Galore! One in an occasional series on how families of slain police officers cope with the wrenching loss.
Larry McDonald stands in a crowded hotel suite, plastic cup of sambuca held high, listening to his son's friends offer toasts.
"He was loyal," says one. "That's what he was."
"For PAT!" says another.
"For PAT!" comes the chorus. Police, firefighters, and relatives down their drinks.
If they're spare with words, their sentiment is eloquent. They have all come to Washington during National Police Week in May to attend memorial services for police killed in the line of duty. Specifically for Patrick McDonald.
"We miss him," says a fellow highway patrolman, as he adjusts a T-shirt with Pat's name and badge on it.
"God bless you," Larry tells the group, his white mustache trembling. "God bless you all."
In walks his wife, Patsy, and their daughter, Megan, a law student at Drexel. The two women are both thin, with fine blond hair and sharp features, their faces distinguishable only by age and duration of suffering.
"What is this, Northeast Philadelphia in here?" Megan asks, looking around the room.
Everyone laughs.
Patsy sits down. "Tell me a Pat story," she asks. "A nice one."
"He was quiet," says an old classmate of Pat's from Archbishop Ryan High School. "And very serious." Patsy nods and lays her hands in her lap. "He was," she says, "very serious."
Of their three children, Pat, the youngest, was the most self-disciplined.
"I always thought he should be in the military. He was so regimented," Patsy says. "In first grade, the first day of school, he buttoned his shirt, wrong, but he buttoned it. And put on a tie. You never had to tell him to do his homework."
Physically, however, he was a boy without brakes.
When he was 5, on vacation in Myrtle Beach, S.C., she watched in horror as he jumped into a go-cart and took off, full throttle. The first time they took him skiing, "he was hanging off the lift." At the summit, he turned and said, "Well? What are we here for?" Then he flew down the mountain. At 12, he tore the ligaments in his knee playing football.
His siblings attended Penn Charter. But Pat wanted to stay in the neighborhood with his friends and play football. "He liked to say he was 5-foot-9 and a half," says Larry. "And he was only 150 pounds. But he made all-Catholic senior year."
When Pat was a junior in high school, his brother, Michael, who suffered from clinical depression, committed suicide. That was in 1994. Michael was 20 years old.
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