We miss you Liberty!

Posted by Sumit J. on June 29th, 2007 filed in liberty

Liberty was my cousin. I grew with Liberty and had the pleasure of seeing him through all his stages of development. I remember Liberty through the Mr. T years, the long hair heavy metal days, and most recently as an intellectual, an activist and general humanitarian. Over the last few years I lived across the country and we didn’t see each other all that often unless there was a big family event or we crossed paths at my house when he came to see my parents and my brother.

There are a lot of things one can say about Liberty, and many of those things have been said by others. One constant in every facet of his life was the effort and energy he put into everything he did. He never half-assed anything. When he was skateboarding as a kid, he always put in 100%. If he was playing video games, you didn’t want to play against him because you would lose. Anyone who ever played him in Street Fighter II knows what I’m talking about. I really don’t remember him pursuing anything he didn’t put his heart into and succeed at.

Over the last few years whenever we got together, Liberty and I would almost always end up having some sort of a discussion as I was the “Corporate” guy in the rat race and Liberty was anything but. We often didn’t agree but he always made me think. One thing (among many) that I always respected about Liberty was that for someone so firm and passionate about his beliefs, he always genuinely listened to and considered my views. That’s a very impressive and rare ability.

Like everyone else, I’ve done a lot of thinking about Liberty over the last few days and all the good times we shared. Some of my favorite memories of Liberty were when my brother (Ricky) and I would go and stay at Amit and Liberty’s house for a few days to a week at a time. We rode bikes, skateboarded (I sucked, Liberty was really good), played video games (Liberty was really good at that too), picked on my brother, caught lizards, and swam in his pool. Liberty taught me how to do flips in his pool. We jumped off his roof together. He got me into paintball; he was really good at that too. Those really were some great times!

We’ll miss and love Liberty forever.

- Sumit

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