An 11-year-old boy spent his summer mowing lawns to buy a headstone for a man he had never met. The man was his biological father, buried in an unmarked grave in Chicago.
Brandon Bakke's adoptive mother Brandy found his biological sister Tiffany on Facebook in June, only to learn their father had passed away at 56 from an asthma attack the year before.
Tiffany warned that nothing marked his grave because the family couldn't afford a monument.
Brandon had been saving money all summer to buy himself a hoverboard.
He told Brandy he wanted to use the $175 he had saved to buy a grave marker instead. "I told him it would cost a lot more than that," she said.
"And he said, 'Then I'll do what I have to do.'"
After mowing more lawns and doing odd jobs, Brandon raised $400.
He then contacted Dakota Monument in South Fargo, who heard his story and donated the headstone entirely for free, letting Brandon design it himself.
He asked Tiffany what his father was like. She told him he loved to cook and fed the homeless.
"After she said that, I knew exactly what I wanted to put on there," Brandon said. He designed the stone with two hands holding a bowl of soup.
"I don't think anybody should go unknown in life," Brandon told WDAY. "If he could see it, he would be proud of me."
He never met his father. He honoured him anyway.
I teach auto shop at a small high school. We work on students cars, teachers cars, students parents cars and some community people cars. We only charge for parts and not labor, so we saved some people a lot of money last school year. This last school year we did 126 oil changes, 68 brake jobs, 85 alignments, 4 steering racks, 22 tune ups, 32 struts, 20 shock absorbers, 4 transfer cases, mounted and balanced 82 new tires, 4 timing chains, 15 valve cover gaskets, 14 thermostats, 4 radiators, 12 in tank fuel pumps, 8 EVAP canisters, 6 exhaust manifolds, 4 mufflers, 15 AC repairs including evacuate and recharge, 8 alternators, 22 batteries, 9 starters and so much more! Proud of those students I am!