We are so pleased to announce that we raised over $84,000 in net proceeds from the 2018 "Fairways for the Armed Forces" golf outing.
Those funds will be used to fund the Nicholas J. Murphy Pro Bono Clinic, which is providing free and reduced rate family law legal services for veterans and members of the Armed Forces, for the military grants given out at Christmas to military families in need, and for the educational college scholarships to student-athletes.
Thank you all so much for all of your support and generosity. Because of you, Nick’s legacy will continue to grow and make the world a better place for many people in the years and decades to come.
We are also pleased to introduce our new Foundation logo (above) that stresses the legal work we are doing to "Pay It Forward" in Nick Murphy's honor. It is similar to the name of the golf outing and stresses how important the legal work we are doing for veterans and active duty military will be for the future of Nick's Foundation. To date, we have undertaken 54 cases and completed over $210,000 worth of free legal work. No one else in the private sector in the entire country is doing what we are doing as a private legal corporation at the law firm of Murphy & Dunn and through the non-profit organization of the Nicholas J. Murphy Foundation. It makes us so proud.
Thank you to Pat Clark Productions for another wonderful video commemorating the 2018 outing. Below is the 2018 Fairways for the Armed Forces video. Watch it all the way to the end to see Nick Murphy himself in action. Click on the picture to watch the golf video.
Below is the entire 38 second video of Nick playing golf with his father in Alabama two months before he was killed. For those of you that read the Facebook posts of G. Edward Murphy, but never knew Nick, this gives you a glimpse of him in real life. That was the best $200.00 ever spent to play 9 holes of golf with Nick. He was and is a great son and a great person.
Below is a photo from the 2018 Fairways for the Armed Forces golf outing WITH NICK'S HEART RECIPIENT FROM FLORIDA, AARON BERNSTEIN.
The second man on the left is Aaron Bernstein, Nick Murphy‘s heart recipient. Over the past 14 months, Aaron has become a friend of our family. We have watched him go from being unhealthy and recovering from the heart surgery to being fully healthy and being back to a normal healthy 54-year-old active athletic man. All of that is largely in part because of the receipt of Nick’s healthy heart. Aaron truly has "the heart of a champion" by having Nick's heart beating in his chest.
We have also watched on Facebook the posts from Pamela Harmon Brown, the woman who received both of Nick Murphy’s lungs in a double lung transplant. She was literally on her deathbed and now is fully healthy and recovered. She has a new lease on life because she received Nick’s lungs.
Pamela in the middle of her family, Thanksgiving 2017
Almost weekly WE ARE in contact with Breona Mackoff Williams, and WE watch her continue to recover and restart her life after the accident.
Breona was the fellow sailor who Nick pushed out of the way and saved her life. She is recently married and will be getting out of the Navy. She has her whole life ahead of her and great things will happen. All of that is possible because of the bravery of Nick Murphy.
There are three other organ donor recipients in the South who also received Nick’s organs. We hope they and their families are happy and healthy as well. Nick would have wanted that and so do we.
To any organ donor families or organ donor recipients, we hope you meet each other. It has meant the world to our family to know that something good came from Nick’s death and to meet his recipients.
FROM ED MURPHY: In many ways, Nick Murphy has also saved me.
I was always a good father and a good husband, but I was not necessarily the best citizen. Nick’s death has opened up the world to me and shown me how I can change the world and how together all of us can change the world for the better. Thousands and thousands of people will be helped through the Nicholas J. Murphy Foundation and I, along with my family, are so proud to be a part of it all. Theresa, Grant, Alec, Laney, and all of the attorneys and paralegals at Murphy and Dunn give 100% to the cause and we are making the world a better place.
That makes us very proud and thankful.
If you read my posts, you will see many people tell me that they could never have done what we are doing. However, that is not true. Each one of us is capable of anything if we put our mind to it, prioritize it, and focus our energies on it. I am convinced that the sky is the limit no matter what each one of us want to do if we simply focus our energy on it. When Nick died, I was so scared that he would be forgotten that I put much of my energy into his Foundation. Because I have been laser focused on that, and because we have so many family and friends willing to help out, it has been a success. But this is just the beginning; bigger and bigger things are going to continue to happen.
And the same thing can happen for each one of you if you simply focus your energy on the task.
I hope no one has to go through what our family did in order to learn this lesson, so I ask all of you to focus your energy on something important to you and see where it takes you. Together, if we all individually focus our attention on something important to help each other and we work together as a community, anything is possible. Peoria and the Central Illinois community is amazing, and I look forward to spending the rest of my life here making it a better place.
Thank you everyone. We could not have done this without you.
Ed, Theresa, Grant, Maria, Alec and Delaney
