Published: May 18, 2008 01:11 am         

A tree for Trae at Tourtellotte

MANKATO — Most of us never knew Trae Peterson, a former Mankato resident who passed away at the age of 13 on Jan. 6. Judging by the display of affection for him — still four months later — it is certainly our loss.

“Everybody loved him,” says Karen Herwig, a close friend of Peterson family. “He would befriend anybody and everybody in no time at all.”

Trae moved to Mankato in 2003 at the age of 8 to start third grade. Two years later, he befriended Herwig’s son, Nick, and the two became inseparable.

Although Nick never played youth baseball with Trae, he knew his friend had also became close with a lot of the guys on his Mankato Area Youth Baseball Association (MAYBA) teams. Trae and Nick started the seventh grade together at Dakota Meadows before Trae and his mom moved to Shakopee in late October.

Trae quickly bonded with some members of the Shakopee baseball team he had played against while competing with Mankato. He also remained close to Nick and stayed over in Mankato at the Herwig home during New Year’s Eve weekend.

He started feeling poorly when he returned to Shakopee the next day and was kept home from school the day after New Year’s. He went back to school the following day, but his mother had trouble waking him the following morning and he was promptly taken to the hospital by ambulance. Two days later he was gone, an unfathomable victim of bacterial meningitis which attacks the brain.

“He was just a good kid who loved to play baseball,” says Dennis Majeske, a manager of one Trae’s MAYBA baseball teams. “He always had a kind word for everybody.”

What a lot of even his closest friends don’t know about was that Trae was born with physical abnormalities that required constant surgery. He was in pain for long stretches at a time but his friends never heard him complain.

In the two months he lived in Shakopee he endeared himself to a number of classmates. Enough so, that when the Shakopee traveling 13-year-old team comes to Mankato today to play the MAYBA traveling team, Trae’s life will be remembered by commemorating a newly planted tree in his honor at Tourtellotte Park.

“That shows the kind of boy he was,” says Kim Turcotte of Shakopee, the organizer of the ceremony. “Even though he only lived in Shakopee two months he had an amazing affect on people. Most of the players on both teams knew Trae and they want to remember him this way.”

The tree, a variety of crab apple, was donated by Betty Koberoski who runs Mankato’s Edenvale Nursery. It was planted on Friday by Brian Hegberg of the Mankato Forestry Department. Neither Koberoski nor Hegberg ever met Trae but, from listening to others talk about him, felt it was important to make today’s ceremony happen.

That’s pretty heady stuff for a young boy who managed to live only 13 years on this earth.

It’s apparent Trae’s legacy of love, tenderness and courage touched most of the people he knew. And even some of those he didn’t.



Jim Rueda is the Free Press sports editor. To contact him, call 344-6381 or e-mail him at jrueda@mankatofreepress.com.