In a subculture where some clubs cultivate an outlaw image, the Jarheads stood for just the opposite. As former Marines, they celebrated self-sacrifice and safety. They rode for charitable causes, including Toys for Tots, and spent one Saturday a month bringing home-cooked meals to wheelchair bound veterans in a spinal cord unit.
Last month they were on their way to an American Legion post in New Hampshire for their annual meeting when a driver with a history of drug arrests plowed his pickup truck into them.
As the club’s president, Mazza, who was known as Woody, had been the first in the line of 15 motorcycles. He died, along with six other people, in what is believed to be the deadliest accident involving motorcycles in recent U.S. history. To a group of combat veterans, it felt just like an IED explosion. The world upended in an instant. Shreds of flesh and metal flew. The truck burst into flames.
Manny Ribeiro, 48, the club’s vice president, had been on the second bike that day, along with his wife, Valerie. Miraculously, they survived. Now he fights flashbacks as he takes the helm of the battered group.
The tragedy touched a chord among motorcycle enthusiasts and military families across the country, who have held rides and fundraisers in solidarity with the fallen seven. Motorcyclists from across the country came to pay their respects at a memorial event Saturday celebrating all who died in the accident.
Buffalo Soldiers, a black motorcycle club inspired by black regiment that fought in the Civil War, came down from Boston to support the Jarheads, saying the club of ex-Marines always arrived first to their charity events. Bikers Against Child Abuse, a motorcycle club formed to help abused children, came from Rhode Island to support. Even the Pagans, an outlaw club that frequently clashes with the police, arrived to pay their respects, parting the crowd with their heavily-tattooed faces.
“Clubs that would have normally been fighting put their differences aside,” said Jeff Dion, who rode down from New Hampshire with a group of motorcyclists who held a ride for the Jarheads last weekend that attracted thousands of bikes and riders from as far away as Australia.
Since the accident, Ribeiro, a father of five who works as a job site foreman for an excavating company, has had a macabre to-do list: Attend funerals. Raise money for hospital bills. Offer support to the orphans of the deceased.
He speaks about completing his tasks in military terms.
“We’re going to pick our heads up and put our boots back on,” he said. “We’re going to complete the mission.”
The Jarheads lost more people that day than Ribeiro’s combat unit lost in the first Gulf War; so many that it had been impossible to attend all their funerals.
“Desma was on the same day as Fritz,” he said, referring to Desma Oakes, who died while riding on the back of her boyfriend Aaron Perry’s motorcycle, and Michael Ferazzi, a police sergeant who was known as Fritz, who also died. Two other victims, Perry, 45, and Daniel Pereira, 58, were buried on the same day in different states.
That is where the idea came of holding a celebration of all seven lives that everyone could attend. It started as something small, for the Jarheads. And then it grew bigger.
A band offered to play. A pastor offered to speak. A few food trucks offered to feed people. Then Bob Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, offered up his team’s venue — the largest parking lot at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough.
Since then, tasks related to the memorial event — from getting permits to organizing port-a-potties — have mixed in with other heartbreaking responsibilities. They attended the funeral of Edward and Jo-Ann Corr, of Lakeville, Massachusetts, who left behind two children and two grandchildren. They visited Joshua Morin at a hospital in Maine. He survived the crash with the help of a makeshift tourniquet that Ribeiro made out of his belt.
Then there was Oakes’ son to worry about. The young man, who had just graduated from high school, had already lost his father and little brother to cancer. Now his mom was gone, too.
“Who’s going to help him? He has to be helped,” Ribeiro said. “The money we are raising that would have gone to her recovery, it’s going to go to pay his college tuition or to send him to trade school.”
Ribeiro has not met the boy yet to discuss his plans. That is another unfinished task.
Then, in the quiet moments, questions flooded his head. Why had he survived? Did his friends die in vain or was there a reason?
As more information came out about the driver of the truck, Ribeiro’s grief curdled into anger.
Why had Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, a 23-year-old truck driver who had slammed into them, been allowed to keep his commercial driver’s license after losing control of an 18 wheeler in Texas and being arrested for drug possession there? Why had the state of Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles failed to process the warning about Zhukovskyy that had come in from Connecticut after he failed a sobriety test in May?
“I have a 4-year-old grandson that could probably figure out communication over the internet faster than the Massachusetts RMV,” Ribeiro said. But even the resignation of the head of the Registry of Motor Vehicles did not satisfy him.
It only seemed to point to a bloated, overpaid bureaucracy that had left more than 1,600 warnings from other states about dangerous drivers unprocessed.
Then came questions about why Zhukovskyy, a green-card holder from Ukraine had been allowed to stay in the country even though he had been arrested for everything from larceny to drunken driving and possession of drug paraphernalia.
“This guy wasn’t even a citizen,” Ribeiro said during an interview with Jeff Kuhner, a talk-show host who bills himself as “Liberalism’s Worst Nightmare.”
And just like that, grief took a political turn. For many conservatives in Massachusetts, the fallen Jarheads became a symbol of patriotic Americans cut down by an immigrant with a criminal record.
Hours before the memorial event at Gillette Stadium, Kuhner held a “Take Back Our State” rally in front of the Massachusetts State House.
Ribeiro spoke to the crowd of about 300 people who held signs that read “secure our borders” and “Trump 2020.”
He asked them to remember “the collateral damage left behind by someone’s dereliction of duty.”
“You could lose seven loved ones because of someone who shouldn’t have had a license or who shouldn’t have even been here,” he said.
Although Ribeiro expressed reluctance to politicize his club or his friends’ deaths, he wanted to be sure that they did not die in vain.
“Something’s got to change,” he said before the rally began, without saying exactly what.
A few hours later, a parking lot at Gillette Stadium filled with growling motorcycles. A Navy chaplain who served with a Marine battalion in Fallujah, Iraq, said a prayer onstage. Later, Kraft pledged to donate at least $100,000 to the Jarheads fund.
Judy Boyd, who rode down on the back of a motorcycle from the Manchester area, said she was moved that so many motorcyclists had died so senselessly.
“To think that they survived combat, only to die like that,” she said.