Thomas was born at 10:18 am at Presbyterian St. Luke’s Medical Center in Denver, Colorado. His first home was on Lake Dillon in Frisco, Colorado, at 9,000-foot elevation in the high-country of Summit County. When Thomas was two-years old, he and his family moved to a log home that they built on a 40-acre parcel of land, south of Breckenridge, at 10,300-foot elevation in Park County, Colorado. At that time, Park County only had two traffic lights, and the county was twice the size of Rhode Island. From the time he was a tiny child, Thomas had a deep and abiding love for Colorado – fresh air, clear skies, snow-capped peaks, lots of snow, deep blue mountain lakes, crystal clear streams, enormous remote wilderness areas to camp and hike in, and the laid-back, high-country feeling of the Rocky Mountains.

Thomas had a very sensitive heart. He was a deep feeling, empathic, and perceptive person who was attuned to his own emotions, the emotions of others, and he could sense when things were not right in a relationship, and when people needed to talk together and work things out. But Thomas kept much of his emotional life inside. He was a deeply private person who valued his psychological and intellectual space, his autonomy, and his freedom. Thomas had character, a conscience, a sense of wanting things to be fair and equitable in life, and in his relationships, and a deep sense of integrity. For Thomas, true “integrity” was not perfection. Rather, integrity was a commitment to course correction – to coming back to the principles, values, and inner truths that he believed in after he had said or done something that he later regretted, or after making a wrong decision. Thomas made some wrong decisions, but over time, he would have found his way, his calling, and his destiny in life, if that life had not been taken from him so soon.

Thomas was home schooled by his mother, Elin, for kindergarten and first grade using Charlotte Mason’s home-schooling approach that focused on literature, reading, experience-based learning, and Bible study. His mom taught him to do elementary math with an abacus. Thomas lived in the high-country of Colorado until he was five years old, and then he and his family moved to Colorado’s front-range in Longmont just north of Boulder. He attended the Rocky Mountain Christian Academy in Niwot, Colorado for grades two through five, and then he transferred to Altona Middle School in Longmont, Colorado for grades six through eight. While at Rocky Mountain Christian Academy, Thomas began his years-long journey through the ranks of scouting, going from a Tiger Cub to the Eagle Scout rank which he earned in 2019. During his scouting years, Thomas earned dozens and dozens of merit badges for scouting skills, and he attended numerous Cub Scout and Boy Scout camps, where he camped in the high-country of Colorado, built snow caves to sleep in, participated in dog-sled races over snowy terrain, hiked and camped in California’s wilderness, and did a 50-mile back-packing trip in the wilderness area along the western coast of British Columbia.

Thomas was “edgy” and stood apart from many societal expectations, exhibiting an unconventional type of wisdom that exceeded his years. He was perceptive, empathic, respectful, thoughtful, sensitive, and kind, and at the same time, he was also objective, analytic, and privately passionate about his ideas, concepts, and beliefs. Thomas was imaginative, audacious, and nimble within the world of his mind, and he was most himself when he was alone in his room – surrounded by walls that were covered with signed posters of his favorite bands, paper tickets from concerts he had been to, and pictures of his family and friends. Thomas was also famous for his “collections” and gathering complete sets of things like comic books, Thomas the Tank Engine trains, Puffles, vinyl LP albums of his favorite bands that he played on his turntable, Lego sets, Pokémon cards, and tee shirts from his favorite bands.

Thomas was baptized at St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church in Breckenridge, Colorado on Sunday, April 27, 2003, and he made a public profession of faith on March 3, 2013, at First Presbyterian Church in Boulder, Colorado where he said the following: “I was baptized in the Episcopal Church in Breckenridge when I was 11 months old. My parents made promises for me about bringing me up in a Christian home and leading me to faith in God when I was too young to understand. Now I’m old enough to understand things about God on my own, so I told my dad and mom that I wanted to talk about my faith in front of the church. One of my favorite scriptures is John 3:16; ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.’ So today I say on my own, that Jesus is my savior and I want to live for him.”

Thomas had little need to judge or try to change others, rather he always tried to notice and understand them because of his deep and abiding respect for his own (and others’) personal boundaries. He tended to observe people and life, without trying to interfere or to change them, but paradoxically, his own tender heart and sensitivity caused him to be strongly affected and influenced by others. Thomas loved to search for the hidden meaning of events, or for that special piece of insider information that gave him leverage in “knowing” something, or in facing the challenges and difficulties of life, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic world that he lived in for the last 16 months of his life. He sought-out kids (often younger kids) who were being ignored, treated poorly, or marginalized by the “in-crowd” and befriended them, helped them feel accepted for who they were, and often these people became some of his closest and longest lasting friendships.

Thomas had a deep love for music – all kinds of music, from all different eras. He went to many concerts with bands that had names like, My Chemical Romance, All Time Low, Blink 185, Sleeping with Sirens, 21 Pilots, May Day Parade, and he also went to many concerts by Christian artists such as Skillet, Mercy Me, Toby Mac, Jeremy Camp, Kari Jobe, Lecrae, Francesca Battistelli, Tenth Avenue North, and Kutless, and Thomas knew the lyrics to all the songs by heart. He also loved, and knew, the music of the Beatles, Kenny Rogers, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, jazz artists like Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Maynard Ferguson, and Stan Getz, and the classical music of Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach, Pachelbel, Paganini, and Tchaikovsky. He wrote over 50 of his own songs, some of which he recorded and mixed using a laptop-based recording studio. Thomas played the trumpet, the acoustic and electric guitar (i.e., a Les Paul), the bass, and the ukulele, and he could be heard playing and singing many of the songs he wrote quietly in his room into the wee hours of the night.

Moving to California in 2016 was difficult for Thomas because he didn’t want to leave his home in Colorado, and his friends whom he loved dearly – many of whom he kept in regular contact with till the day of his passing. His parents (Mark and Elin) promised that he could go back home to visit his friends often, and Thomas did so about three or four times a year, to hang out, go to concerts, renew friendships, and savor the beauty of the Colorado Rockies that he missed so much. Some of his Colorado friends also came to visit him in California, and he would show them the new life that he had shaped for himself in Campbell, California, just 25 miles (as the crow flies) from Santa Cruz and the Pacific Ocean – something that his Colorado friends didn’t have back home. He was looking forward to moving back to his native Colorado and reuniting with his friends, face-to-face, in the Fall of 2022 to attend college in Greeley, Colorado which was about 40 miles north of where he lived in Longmont.

Thomas attended Del Mar High School in San Jose which is both a California Distinguished School (ranked higher than 78% of the high schools in California), and an International Baccalaureate World School that enables Del Mar to offer a slate of academic courses that are equivalent to college-level classes that are recognized by universities worldwide. Thomas played the trumpet in the Del Mar Symphonic Band his freshman, sophomore, and junior year, and he played in the Del Mar Marching Band his sophomore year. He also started the Del Mar songwriting club which continues to be active. Thomas finished his senior year with remote classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic and graduated from Del Mar High School in June of 2020 without a prom and in a remote ceremony where each graduate was filmed walking the stage and getting his or her diploma separately, and then the footage of individual recipients was edited into a single video.

Thomas had lots of intellectual firepower and the ability for extended periods of mental concentration. He was truly imaginative, and an unconventional thinker who had the natural ability to solve very complex and vexing problems. He could digest enormous amounts of information very quickly, and in discussions with peers and well-educated adults, there was rarely a topic or issue that Thomas didn’t already know about and have a perspective on. He stood outside the socio-cultural context of “the crowd” which gave him a unique vantage point for insights and commentary on people, situations, culture, media and the existential questions of life; things he often discussed with his dad, Mark, during “boy-times” – day-trips to a Denver Rockies game, Estes Park, the Denver Zoo and Natural History Museum, the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, movies (too numerous to count), a San Francisco 49ers game, Carmel, Point Lobos, San Francisco, concerts at Stanford University, or longer journeys to places like Cocoa Beach, Florida, the Denver Comic Con, Colorado Springs, New York City, Los Angeles, and San Diego where the two of them spent quality father-son time together.

For the last five years, Thomas and his family attended the Presbyterian Church of Los Gatos (PCLG) where Thomas was active in the youth group and made friend with many people who loved him dearly, and who nicknamed him “Tommy.” These more recent friendships helped Thomas navigate the difficult times of adjusting to California and leaving his day-to-day interactions with friends back in Colorado. During his time at PCLG, Thomas made three trips to Mexico with PCLG through its partner, Amor Ministries, which is a non-profit religious organization that has spent the last 40 years partnering with local pastors and leaders in Mexico to build homes alongside families in need, with the goal of keeping families together. The PCLG high school youth group also led two “Love of God” (L.O.G) retreats annually at Koinonia Camp & Conference Center in Watsonville, California where high school students shared about God’s love in Jesus Christ with their peers. Thomas attended five L.O.G. retreats, one of which one of his friends from Colorado (Jillian) attended, and all of which Thomas played a leadership role in. Thomas’ Eagle Scout project involved designing and constructing a lighting system for the redwood grove on the PCLG campus, which allows the church to use this newly lighted space for evening activities and services.

In the later part of his high school years, it became even more apparent that Thomas had both intellectual capabilities (i.e., IQ) that coexisted with a deep sense of self-awareness and emotional intelligence about himself and his relationships with others (i.e., EQ). On the one hand, he was reserved, shy, and detached which enabled him to focus dispassionately on the facts and issues involved in emotionally charged situations without being rattled, so his decisions tended to be logical, elegant, and unfettered by sentiment. But on the other hand, his good heart, sensitive spirit, empathic nature, and emotional connection to others allowed him to do this with a sense of caring and openness to what others felt and needed. Had he not passed from this life at such a young age, Thomas’ intellectual capabilities would have allowed him to make a meaningful contribution to some professional field or endeavor, and at the same time, the emotional and interpersonal capabilities he possessed and continued to develop, would have helped him become a good husband, a good father, and a good citizen.

Along with song writing, Thomas also developed good expertise in writing poems, stories, and journaling his thoughts, feelings, and insights about life and relationships. During his senior year, he decided to major in journalism to capitalize on his writing abilities. Thomas was accepted at the University of Northern Colorado, Colorado State University, and San Jose State University and he planned to study journalism. But the bitterly polarized war of words and deeds of the last election so appalled him, that he changed his major to anthropology and ancient religion. The thought of actually working in the perverse environment of the 24X7 news cycle and social media as a career was not how he wanted to spend his life. At the time that he died, he was attending West Valley Community College in Saratoga, California with all on-line classes because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He planned to transfer to the University of Northern Colorado in the fall of 2022 to finish his bachelor’s degree in anthropology and ancient religion, and was planning to go on to graduate school, also at the University of Northern Colorado.

Thomas had a deep thirst for knowledge, and to understand what life is about, and this led him to the YouTube videos and writings of Jordon Peterson. Thomas and his dad, Mark, already had an on-going dialogue about deep matters of psychology, faith, science, truth, and life during “boy-times,” so Thomas introduced his dad to Peterson’s work and suggested that they read him together. Peterson rejected both left-leaning and right-leaning “ideology” – describing it as an oversimplification and falsification of the much more complex and paradoxical realities of life. Peterson describes ideologues as follows. “They adopt a single axiom; government is bad, immigration is bad, capitalism is bad, patriarchy is bad. Then they filter and screen their experiences and insist ever more narrowly that everything can be explained by that axiom. They believe, narcissistically, underneath all that bad theory, that the world could be put right, if only they held the controls.”

Together Thomas and his dad read and discussed Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning, his second book, 12 Rules for Life, and they were in the process of reading Peterson’s new book, Beyond Order when Thomas died. Like Peterson, Thomas rejected both left-leaning and right-leaning ideology, but this required him to live in the essential tension of the current ideologically polarized world – a world that W.H. Auden characterized as an age of anxiety, and Tim Keller described as a growing crisis of hope and pessimism. The consequence of Thomas’ rejection of ideology and living in the essential tension “in-between” helped him develop a sense of tolerance towards people who thought, felt, and believed differently than he did.

For the last two years of his life, Thomas had a girlfriend, named Haley who he met in the summer of 2019 through a PCLG friend. She was a hard-working, disciplined, extremely bright, good-hearted, friendly person who was in a special program at West Valley Community College where she graduated from high school with her high school diploma and an Associate of Arts degree. Haley was a sweet girl who was a good influence on Thomas and was a good friend to him. Thomas took Haley to his homecoming dance in 2019 when he started his senior year at Del Mar, and they would go camping, spend time at the beach near Aptos, watch Netflix movies on Thomas’ laptop, and Haley was often a welcome part of Thomas’ family celebrations, e.g., birthdays, parties, and holidays. Haley’s parents liked, and respected Thomas as a person, and when Thomas’ prom night was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they organized and held a “prom-at-home” night in their backyard so Thomas and Haley would not miss-out on this special time. Haley was a “rock” who provided a deep sense of stability for Thomas in California, and Thomas loved her very deeply.

Thomas was a light that burned brightly. In the 18 years that he lived, he had a powerful impact on the lives of countless people, including his family, friends, neighbors, and the world around him. Over his years as a scout, he did numerous community service projects. Thomas had a heart for the poor, the needy, and the destitute. For the last 12 years, Thomas sponsored a young Ethiopian boy named Daniel with his own money through Compassion International – a Christian non-profit organization that works with 1.9 million children, through 8,000 international church partners around the world to positively impact the long-term development of children living in poverty. Thomas also had a burden for, and helped support, one of the poorest, most neglected cross-sections of American society, Native Americans. Thomas loved his mother Elin, and his father, Mark, from the bottom of his heart, and they loved him more than life itself.

The complete story of Thomas’ life and death is described in Mark Bodnarczuk’s forthcoming memoir entitled, Finding New Life After the Death of My Son, available worldwide on websites like www.amazon.com.

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