Person Page - 3296

     His Social Security Number was 231-79-9418.⁵ Max Silver Poff was buried at Blue Ridge Memorial Gardens, 5737 Airport Road NW, Roanoke, Virginia.^1,3 He was born on November 17, 1997 at Roanoke, Virginia.^1,2,5,3 He died on February 20, 2014 at Roanoke, Virginia, at age 16.^1,5,3,4 He Max Silver Poff, of Roanoke Co., born November 17, 1997, went to be with his Heavenly Father on February 20, 2014. Max had a heart of gold and was caring and kind to everyone he met. He faced a lot of challenges in his life but he always had a way of putting a smile on your face with his personality. He was preceded in death by his loving grandfather, Franklin D. Poff (Poppie). Max leaves behind his loving parents, David F. and Dianna S. Poff; grandmother, Barbara Poff (Mammaw), sisters, Danielle Holliday, Ashley Aurthur; brothers, John Paul Knowles, and Daniel Stewart; many aunts, uncles, and cousins; and very special friends, Justin, Tristan, Caleb, Adam and Zach. Burial will follow in Blue Ridge Memorial Gardens. on February 23, 2014.¹ He Teen’s suicide leaves lingering questions. The only person who knows for certain what prompted 16-year-old Max Poff to hike into the woods behind his house on a damp February afternoon and put his father’s pistol to his head is no longer around to tell the story. The boy’s friends, family and teachers at William Byrd High School are left to grapple with a fuzzy collage of clues. Rumors float around of bullying encounters at school and of angry words at home. A teary bus ride home from school ended Feb. 20 with Max Poff writing a suicide note to his best friend, Justin. “I’m sorry that I’m doing this but I won’t be suffering anymore,” he wrote in neat block print. After putting pencil to notebook paper, Max called Justin and told him where he could find his body — near the rock in southeast Roanoke County where the two used to camp. Family and friends will gather Sunday at the Vinton War Memorial for a benefit car show to pay for Max’s headstone and raise money for a nonprofit. But they have unanswered questions about his death. Though police have officially determined that school-based bullying was not a factor in the boy’s Feb. 20 suicide, David and Dianna Poff aren’t so certain. Some other Byrd parents and Poff family friends share their skepticism, describing a culture of bullying they say is endemic at the Vinton school. One of them is Donald Angle, Justin’s father and a salt-of-the-earth furniture worker who loved Max as if he were his own son. Angle was the one who found the boy lying sideways next to the boulder, the pistol next to him on the rock; the one who raced to the scene when his son told him what Max had said, then flagged police down after calling 911. Angle and his son were so shocked, it’s been hard trying to equate the bloody scene with the sweet skinny kid who loved fast cars, drawing pictures of fast cars and making people laugh. “I just don’t get it,” he said. “Why it had to come to this.” He had his learner’s permit and was just 13 hours shy of taking his driver’s license test. The Impala his dad had already bought for him is still outside the family’s front door. Max had long dreamed of painting it sunburst red, and adding wheel rims and a killer sound system. More than anything, Max wanted to be a Marine. He was proud to have been promoted within the ranks of his school JROTC, of wearing his uniform and flaunting his shoulder braid insignia and beret. “He wore this one on Tuesdays, this one on Thursdays,” his mother, Dianna Poff, said, fanning the pressed uniforms she keeps in his bedroom closet. “Max was a lover and a protector, not a fighter.” At his funeral, several students spoke about Max sticking up for them against bullies. Two girls credited him with saving their lives. “He had talked them out of it [suicide],” recalled Wendy McCauley, Max’s former elementary school art teacher and a longtime family friend. McCauley recalled Max as a happy but sensitive kid, a silly face-maker and joke-teller with a great eye for detail. “He was the kind of kid who put on this ‘I’m a tough kid, I can handle anything.’ But he was really a softy with a big ole teddy-bear heart,” McCauley said. “Things would get to him, and he’d try to hide it. But you could see it under the surface.” By his sophomore year, Max was 6-foot-1 and 130 pounds. He and Justin could each put away three bologna sandwiches in a sitting, and Max wouldn’t gain a pound. At all-you-can-eat Cici’s Pizza, Max once ate 20 slices, his dad said, then went back for dessert. He’d wanted to try out for football — until a kid at school berated him for his size, claiming he’d never make the cut. That student, an athlete widely known as a Byrd bully among the students, teased Max repeatedly about his size, saying Max would never make the football team, according to several students and parents interviewed by The Roanoke Times. “It was like, ‘You ain’t big enough to hang with the big dogs,’ ” recalled a Byrd sophomore who said Max confided in her about being bullied on several occasions. The sophomore, whose name is not being published to protect her identity, said her mother called the school to report the harassment, and she herself reported it to a guidance counselor. But they never did anything. … That kid is definitely still bullying and pushing other kids around,” she said. A mother of another Byrd student — who asked that her name not be used because she feared her daughter might be bullied more severely — confirmed that account. Her own daughter was in ROTC with Max and experienced bullying at the hands of another student, who is also fellow ROTC cadet. “A week after Max died, for whatever reason, they ganged up on her,” said the mother, who is a Vinton resident and works in the accounting department of a Roanoke business. They showed a picture of her around to a group and laughed mockingly at her, the mother said. “When I asked her why, she said, ‘I guess it’s because I’m ugly.’ She’s made to feel different and ostracized,” added the mother, a single mom who has another, younger daughter at the school who has not experienced bullying. Her eldest daughter has been called a “slut” because she’s large-chested, and “stupid” because of a learning disability. She’s twice been hospitalized for severe depression and suicidal thoughts. "When Max killed himself, it opened my daughter’s eyes that she wasn’t alone. She saw how Dianna was hurting. She said, ‘Mom, I could never do that to you.’ So in a twisted way … losing Max saved my daughter’s life.” According to a Youth Risk Behavior Survey, half of all Roanoke County school kids reported being bullied in 2012 — 12.7 percent of those surveyed said it happened to them daily. The rate for attempted suicide among the high school teens was 11.4 percent, almost double the national average. And an astonishing one in four reported feeling sad or hopeless every day for more than two weeks at a time — the clinical definition of depressed. And yet, both school and police officials initially asserted that bullying had nothing to do with Max Poff’s suicide. “In conducting their investigation, detectives did not find bullying as being a contributing cause to the death of this boy,” said Assistant Chief Chuck Mason of Roanoke County Police. “When we chased the information [leads] down to the original people, the information just didn’t bear up,” Mason said earlier this week. “I’m not sure we would ever say that he was never, ever bullied. But I’m comfortable saying our detectives did not find” evidence of bullying. But bullying rumors abounded in the aftermath on social media, with everyone from classmates to Poff’s own father accused of making life unbearable for Max. There was also talk of prosecuting David Poff for illegally possessing the gun Max used to take his life, though Mason said no such charges would be filed. David Poff volunteered that he is a convicted felon and not allowed to own a gun, stemming from criminal charges dating back nearly 15 years ago. He’s been sober and out of trouble for 10 years, he said. The plumber kept the pistol and rifles in a cabinet, though Max knew where the key was hidden. The guns and gun cabinet were gifts from his late father, and he kept them both for protection and for nostalgia, he said. The pistol was destroyed by police at the Poffs’ request, and the rifles were sold. Asked if detectives had interviewed certain people alleged to be well-known bullies at Byrd — names of which The Roanoke Times turned over to Mason during follow-up interviews — Mason said Friday they were following up on leads, adding, “If anyone comes forward with new information [about the Poff case], if that exists, we would love to talk to that individual.” At a reporter’s suggestion, detectives did re-interview Justin, Poff’s best friend, and were trying to reach out to others interviewed by The Roanoke Times. Schools superintendent Lorraine Lange said her heart goes out to the Poff family, and she hopes the family can heal. “Bullying by definition is something that’s done to the same person constantly over and over again. Because of Columbine and everything, a lot of people are labeling things ‘bullying’ when, unless it’s constant, that’s not really what bullying is.” According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, bullying behaviors “happen more than once or have the potential to happen more than once.” University of Virginia education professor Dewey Cornell added one additional qualifier to the bullying definition: “There has to be a power imbalance between the victim and the perpetrator,” he said. “These things are difficult to legislate, and they require nuanced judgment by school authorities in many cases.” Last August, the U.S. Department of Education issued stern warnings to public schools nationwide, reminding them that acts of bullying involving gender, race, religion or special education status can be federally prosecuted as a civil rights violation. Bullying laws and policies are an extension of a growing children’s rights movement, following such historical protections of children including child labor laws and child abuse laws. “One of the last areas in which children have not been protected is in their workplace, which is the school,” Cornell added. Cornell and other experts encourage schools to adopt evidence-based practices, including comprehensive staff and student training, and parental-notification policies — not to just bring in a single anti-bullying motivational speaker and assume the topic has sufficiently been covered. “The best programs create a peer culture at the school in which bullying is regarded as something that’s not acceptable,” and encourage witnesses of bullying behavior not to show approval, Cornell said. Max called his plumber dad his “drill sergeant.” When a friend from school invited Max to join his family on a beach vacation, his father said no because he didn’t know the family — prompting fury from his son, who wanted desperately to go. David Poff, 46, raised Max mainly as a single dad and frequently took him on plumbing calls at all hours of the day and night. “I’d tell the customer, ‘I need someone to watch my son, and ya gotta feed him.’ ” The Poffs have reunited as a couple, though they are technically still divorced. They have long lived in the same house, with Dianna in the downstairs apartment and David upstairs. “He could read a rule; he could tape a pipe,” his father said. Max helped dig out his grandparents’ basement when his dad added a bathroom there. He especially loved helping his dad’s elderly customers, carrying their laundry and taking out their trash. He had a crush on McCauley, his art teacher, who was a favorite customer, and took special care to wear his ROTC uniform to calls at her house. They’d named him Max Silver Poff — Max, for the warrior “Mad Max,” and Silver for his grandma’s favorite saying, “There’s a silver lining in every cloud.” The Poffs say the lining wasn’t so silver, though, when a few older kids taunted their son last year in ROTC, dumping out his backpack, drinking his Gatorade, and going through his computer. As David Poff recalls telling his son, “We don’t put up with that, Max. Don’t just take it.” When another incident happened a month before his suicide — a kid in gym class poked him in the eye with the feather-end of an archery arrow — Max rushed him, they tousled on the floor, and both kids were suspended for the fight for five days, the Poffs say. David Poff’s longtime customers say rumors of the man’s harsh parenting style are an exaggeration of the man’s blue-collar, old-school work ethic: Take care of your family. Stand up for yourself. Be a man. The last time Laura Bradford Godfrey had the father-and-son plumbing team to her house — just a month before the boy’s death — Max confided to her husband, Tom, “that the reason he went on so many service calls was because he wanted to spend more time with his dad. The idea that David was a bully to his son, that is just not accurate,” Godfrey said. She’d meant to alert David to the boy’s comment but didn’t get to it in time and lives now with that regret. “David has a past, yeah, and he was a little rough around the edges, but he’s also one of the kindest people I know, and he and Max were great together.” Max and David Poff often worked for free on Godfrey’s elderly mother-in-law’s house, sticking around after plumbing jobs to do yard and house chores. “If this was a family that had more money or more social standing, I think the school’s reaction would have been totally different,” she said. A candlelight vigil for Max wasn’t held on school grounds. It was held at Parkway Wesleyan Church instead, and nearly 200 students came. Lange said suicides are handled differently than accidental deaths because “people are afraid of look-alikes, and if you make a big deal of something at school, you’re afraid it’s gonna be repeated.” There were comments on social media claiming that officials wouldn’t allow the vigil on school grounds but after checking with principal Richard Turner, Lange said in a subsequent phone call that “the school was never approached and asked to have one.” Lange also said the school had not received a “direct complaint” about the athlete who allegedly bullied Max and several others at the school. “We need to do another investigation after we get all the information,” she said Friday. The Byrd parent whose daughter was twice hospitalized said she hadn’t thought it would be effective to complain to the superintendent’s office. “I felt like it would make things harder on her if I took it any further,” she said, after her repeated complaints to school administrators were brushed off, she said. “What I literally told my daughter was: ‘Keep your head down. Don’t make waves. Just get through high school and be done with it.’ ” David Poff opens the blinds in his son’s bedroom every morning and closes them every night. He turns up the heat when it’s cold out and stops by the boy’s grave three, sometimes four times a week. When Max became a self-conscious teen, he made his dad take down the framed school pictures hanging on a wall. But since the boy’s death, David has put them all back up, displacing the “poster of a pretty girl in a bathing suit” that Max had displayed — and giving it to his friend. Max loved the Baltimore Ravens, so a Ravens blanket is draped carefully over his bed. Tucked between the bed and the wall is a spray of flowers David bought at Michaels; he changes the arrangement almost weekly to reflect the season or holiday. “Here’s his Easter balloon right here,” he said. In his suicide notes to his parents, Max apologized for being “such a failure.” He called his dad an “asshole” but also his “hero,” and said he hoped David Poff wouldn’t get into trouble because the gun belonged to him. “Momma, I know I’m mean to you sometimes, but I love you,” he wrote. The Poffs are in touch with a growing network of concerned parents whose children have been bullied in schools. A Henry County mom, Tabitha Hilliker, has contacted state Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, about sponsoring statewide anti-bullying legislation. Stanley did not return phone calls requesting a comment. Sen. John Edwards, D-Roanoke, said he would gladly discuss the introduction of a possible bill with the parents and also hopes to beef up a state-mandated — but underfunded — increase in school counselor positions as another anti-bullying strategy. Hilliker’s daughter, an eighth-grader at Fieldale-Collinsville Middle School, was so distraught about being bullied via social media and in person at school that she tried to hang herself in her bedroom — but her sister walked in and stopped it. She’s been hospitalized twice for depression and suicidal thoughts. “The school systems aren’t doing anything, and because there’s not a law out there, there’s nothing us parents can do either,” Hilliker said. David Poff says he beats himself up for taking too many late-night work calls: stopped-up sinks and toilets; other people’s emergencies. “I wish I would have told people … that I had to go home to be with my son instead,” he said, choking up. “I just wanted to see my son in his Marine uniform and tell him, ‘I’m proud a you boy.’?” Wiping tears from his eyes, he surveys the American flag above his son’s bed. “I ain’t a drill sergeant now, am I?” on April 25, 2014.⁶

     Robert Wayne Furrow Sr. was born on September 26, 1947 at Roanoke, Virginia.² He married Barbara Unknown circa 1967.⁵ Robert Wayne Furrow Sr. died on February 21, 2014 at Franklin Co., Virginia, at age 66.^1,3 He Robert Wayne Furrow Sr., 66, of Smith Mountain Lake, went to heaven while surrounded by his family on February 21, 2014. Robert was a loving dad, husband, granddaddy, and friend to all who knew him. Robert is survived by his devoted wife, Barbara K. Furrow of 47 years; daughter, Janet (JJ) Lester; granddaughter, Ashley (Hot Dog) Lester; son and daughter-in-law, Robert (Rob) and Kim Furrow; granddaughter, Grace (Curly) Furrow; daughter and son-in-law, Cindy and Keith Brooks; granddaughter, Emily (Twiggy) Ison; parents, Charles (Edd) and Evelyn C. Furrow; sister and brother-in-law, Libby and Dee Carter; special aunt and uncle, Jenny and Joe Dowling of Orlando, Florida, along with many loving aunts; uncles; nieces; nephews; friends; and extended family at Graham White Mfg. Robert was an amazing man with many talents and accomplishments; plant supervisor at Graham White for 38 years, Navy Veteran, member of the RVRC (Radio Control Club), Harley Davidson Member, and much more. He enjoyed all types of planes, trains and automobiles. He designed and built numerous award winning Street Rods featured in national magazines and calendars. His love for Harley Davidson Motorcycles took him all over the country with his wife, and his passion for drag racing is forever embedded in his legacy. He had a passion for Smith Mountain Lake where they built their retirement home and enjoyed fishing, boating, and spending time with his family on the lake. Special thanks to UVA, Lewis Gale Medical Center, Carillion Franklin Hospice, Richfield Rehab, RMH Carillion Hospital and all the caregivers that took care of him. We are grateful for their love and compassion. A special celebration of his life will be held at Halesford Baptist Church at 1 p.m. Saturday March 1, 2014, 2485 Lost Mountain Rd. Wirtz, Va. 24184. In Robert's honor, the family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations can be sent to Halesford Baptist Church or Franklin County Animal Shelter, 1488 Franklin St. Rocky Mount, Va. Arrangements by Flora Funeral Service and Cremation Center Rocky Mount/Smith Mountain Lake. on February 23, 2014.⁵

     Lisa Dawn Pedigo was buried at Andrew's Chapel Cemetery, Buchanan, Botetourt Co., Virginia.² She was born on August 25, 1967 at Roanoke Co., Virginia.³ As of February 25, 1995,her married name was Fisher.⁴ She married James Randolph "Randy" Fisher, son of Frank Reginald Fisher and Wanda Lou Sisson, on February 25, 1995 at Botetourt Co., Virginia.^1,2,4 Lisa Dawn Pedigo died on June 30, 2020 at Virginia at age 52.² She Lisa Pedigo Fisher, 52, of Roanoke, Virginia, passed away on Tuesday, June 30, 2020. She had a passion for cooking and baking. Lisa loved her job and was employed with Roger L. Bishop's Fine Jewelers. She was preceded in death by her husband, Randy Fisher. Lisa is survived by her two children, Dykotia Fisher and her boyfriend, Jay Austin, and Luke Fisher; parents, James and Alease Pedigo; sister, Kim Hurd and her husband, Rodney; brother, Jimmy Pedigo and his wife, Lisa; and several nieces, nephews, in-laws, other extended family along with very close friends. Funeral Services will be held at 2 p.m. on Friday, July 3, 2020, at Oakey's North Chapel with the Rev. Gary Kingery officiating. The family will receive friends one hour prior to the service. Interment will follow at Andrew's Chapel Cemetery, Buchanan. on July 2, 2020.²