The Kerrs waited seven years for this day. The skate park that their son Patrick raised $5,000 in seed money for was buzzing with a swarm of edgy middle schoolers, boards ready to fly.
They had come to see Andy Macdonald, one of the world's top professional skateboarders. As the eight-time X Games gold medalist swooped effortlessly over the smooth concrete during an exhibition Thursday, only a few kids had the nerve to skate alongside.
Patrick would have been one of them.
The Abington teen never lived to see the park that is named in his honor and that his parents hope will open in July in the Roslyn section of the township. He was fatally injured at 15 in June 2002, when he was skating on a curb on Jenkintown Road and fell under the wheels of a passing tractor-trailer.
He and his brother, Brendan, had been on their way to a skateboard shop.
"He would be so happy that his friends and younger kids coming up have a place to go," said his mother, Liz, who has worked tirelessly to raise nearly half the $100,000 for the park.
About $10,000 more is needed to install a fence, a section of concrete, and a brick path. Organizers are selling engraved bricks for $100. Until it is finished, the 90,000-square-foot park is officially off-limits to skaters, who sneak in anyway.
Patrick and his pals rode wherever they could: at the Fox Chase train station, behind a Wawa store, in LOVE Park when that was allowed.
And the street.
Liz, a heart-transplant nurse at Temple University Hospital, doesn't like to think how the arc of her son's life might have been different had he had a park to skate in close to home.
"If kids weren't on the streets, then kids wouldn't get hit by vehicles. That's just a fact," she said.
Dedicated prodigy
Patrick was 10 and a natural athlete when he took up skateboarding in the late 1990s and dropped every other sport.
"It was different, new, something that not everybody in the neighborhood was doing," said his father, Pearse. "He really took to it."
He and his brother went to Roman Catholic High School so they could be close to LOVE Park, also known as JFK Plaza, a skateboarding mecca that has since been closed to the sport. "It was their life," said Pearse, an electrician. Brendan, now 23, is also an electrician. The Kerrs also have a daughter, Dana, 27.
In the summers, Liz volunteered as a nurse at Camp Woodward, a premier skate camp near State College, Pa., so the brothers could attend free.
