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By the time Chris Brodman had lived to 34 years of age, he’d survived many events that should have already taken his life.
Nine years ago, at the age of 25, Brodman was involved in a head-on collision when a driver slammed into him. Brodman was ejected from his car, through the windshield, and broke his back. He survived.
Earlier this year, Brodman had been smoking on the patio of the Pulse nightclub on June 12, the night of the shooting. He and his friends had run at the first sound of gunfire. They broke a fence and managed to get away, safely.
Three months later, in September, Brodman unexpectedly passed away.
No one could understand how it happened.
He’d been celebrating a friend’s birthday in Tampa when he decided to step outside to smoke. When he didn’t return inside, his friends went to look for him.
By then, Brodman was already dead, on the floor.
The autopsy revealed that Brodman had suffered from a brain hemorrhage, caused by “malformed blood vessels” in his brain, a genetic defect that he’d never known that he had. During the time that Brodman went out to smoke, the vessels burst.
Brodman died instantaneously.
His friends are still in shock because of what happened. Brodman was someone “you wanted to be near,” one of his friends said. “He's the kind of person who went into a room and lit it up. It didn’t matter who you were, you were going to be his friend.”
They never thought they would lose such a warm presence in this way, not after he’d survived so many odds against him.
Brodman’s ashes have been scattered in Greece by a friend, Roy Maldonaldo.
“The ship will be going to Greece, the place you always said you wanted to visit one day and didn't get to,” Maldonaldo wrote of his trip on Facebook. “This is probably the hardest part for me to deal with, along with the part that your life was cut so short.”
