Craig felt he had failed his childhood friend Mark after returning home from service in Afghanistan. Mark was being swallowed up by his addiction to pain medication and the downward spiral of his business. Here Craig expresses the sorrow he felt since Mark’s fatal car accident:

“Uncanny how his life ended right when I came home. Mark was in a real bad way. I thought I could bring him back to his silly old self like in middle school, like in that picture. You see I have that mischievous look; I want to make him laugh, and tell him everything is going to be alright, to pick a new career. The problem was he was physically and mentally degenerated. I had never seen him so broken down.

First he had to get clean and sober off the painkillers.  For sure I was looking to protect him … to lead him to the right place and tell him, Guy, don’t go there! But when he didn’t get anywhere, he just gave up. He didn’t want to redirect his path. He pressed on.  Challenging him only angered him. But I admired him more than he could ever know. Unfortunately he often took on too much at one time, as if he could not strike some balance in his life. He possessed such noble ideas, yet he lacked the calmness necessary to achieve long term goals.

Here we’re celebrating our friendship at the peak of our friendship.  Basketball and Cadillacs were a big deal. Mark and I would sneak into the dealer’s yard after hours and sit in the cars and dream of one day having our own. We even affixed real Cadillac hood ornaments to our handle bars.

It never crossed my mind then that God would take him. I wanted him to pal around with me. But there were welcome home parties, I was seeing my kids, going back to work. I had no breathing room; no time to do both. Mark, too, was always cancelling on me. I knew it was an emergency.

I felt when he died, what? I hadn’t even gotten my hands dirty yet. I thought it was a phase; that he’d snap out of it. In 2007, he knew the bullet was coming for him. In the montage it still is, but I’m protecting him, and he’s just so carefree.”