Maria Coady said goodbye to her son four months ago after he died in a motorcycle accident, and now she has found a way to keep his memory alive.
Thomas Coady, 22, died following a Dec. 5 accident when he collided with a pickup truck at the intersection of Northwest Eighth Avenue and 34th Street. Another student, Halie Guelfi, also 22, was on the back of his motorcycle and died as well.
His mother, Maria Coady, a UF education associate professor, created an endowment in memory of her son.
“He was my heart,” she said.
Part of the $30,000 endowment that was presented to a small crowd Monday afternoon at Emerson Alumni Center will go toward students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences studying biology, just like Thomas. Scholarship recipients will receive about 4 percent of the endowment each year.
The Thomas J. Coady Memorial Scholarship Endowment will be a fundraised award that will be given out every spring to a UF junior or senior studying health disparities, the field Thomas Coady wanted to dedicate his life to.
Carol Ritchie, Thomas Coady’s grandmother, said Thomas wanted to help people.
“Those of us who knew Thomas knew he was a devoted, caring young man,” she said.
Michael Muir, Thomas Coady’s friend from Buchholz High School, described him as passionate about science and said he always put others before himself.
“Tom actually taught me how to be a better person,” he said.
Maria Coady shared with family, friends and supporters a story about how she taught Thomas to read when he was 4 years old.
She said the two of them crushed the “Harry Potter” series together, and her son would insist they pre-order the books because he could hardly wait for the next one to come out.
“Thomas was my inspiration, my voice of reason and my teacher,” she said.
[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 4/7/2015 under the headline “UF student memorialized in scholarship endowment”]
Correction: The original story incorrectly stated that scholarship recipients received the entire endowment.
Maria Coady, a UF education associate professor, presents the Thomas J. Coady Memorial Scholarship, which will award part of a $30,000 endowment every spring to a UF junior or senior studying health disparity, in memory of her son, Thomas Coady, in Emerson Hall on Monday. “Thomas was my inspiration,” she said. “My voice of reason and my teacher.”
Correction: The original caption stated that scholarship recipients receive the entire endowment, when really they just receive part of it.
