Greetings from MONROE Lousisana

SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO leave a place to find out how nice it is. That's what happened to Lindsey Braddock of Monroe, Louisiana.

- BY Bill Hangley Jr.

"I was a wild child. I left, determined never to come back. Everybody knows everybody's business," she says. "We only came back because my daughter was born with the colic, and we needed to be around my mom. ... It turned out to be where friends are family."

As a child, she loved to run wild in Monroe's quiet green streets. As a teen, she chafed at its small-town ways. As a mother, she and her husband, Brett Braddock, learned to love the place all over again. And when they lost their son, Tarver, in a tragic fire in 2024, they found out how much the place loved them.

"The loss of our son has brought the community together. People aren't hurting like us. But they're hurting with us," says Brett. "I've lived in lots of places. But the sense of community here, I've never felt that before."

Monroe is a spacious, green city on the Ouachita River, a place of slow-flowing bayous and low-slung homes surrounded by corn and soybean fields. Along with West Monroe, its cousin across the river, it’s the largest urban area in northeastern Louisiana. Once a Spanish outpost, later a steamboat town, the “Twin Cities” are home today to 60,000 people.

One of them was Tarver, just 16 years old when a late-night fire at a hunting cabin took his life. His family remembers him as a generous and gregarious kid—“wild” like his mom, “hands-on” like his dad, the type who clapped too loud in church but was always ready to join a mission to build a wheelchair ramp or fix a roof.

"He couldn't sit still in the pew," says Lindsey. "But he loved those mission trips."

It was only after he died that the family learned how many times Tarver had bought a classmate lunch or a snack. When a football teammate needed a pair of boots, Tarver gave him his.