On the first Monday of 2026 I found out that my friend, Eric Peterson, had died back on December 13th. Today would have been his 59th birthday. I knew this was going to be a hard post to write, so I decided to hold off on publishing it until today to make sure I got it right and to honor him on his birthday.

UPDATE: There is a GoFundMe campaign to help with medical expenses if you are so inclined.

I got the news from another friend, David Malin, who had called me to wish me a Happy New Year. One of the main drawbacks of being off the main social media platforms is that I miss news like this. Not that it would have changed anything, but it felt weird to learn about it weeks later.

I met Eric in the autumn of 1983. We were both attending the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, although I was a senior and he was a junior. Like most residential schools we had different residence halls, and I had been kicked out of my old dorm (Wyche House) and moved, against my will, to the second floor of Bryan.

It was one of the best things that could have happened to me.

My roommate was (gasp) another junior named Chris Dumas, and he was the best roommate I ever had, in high school or college. Being that he was in the Class of 1985, my friendship with Chris gave me an introduction to other juniors that I might not have met had I stayed in my old dorm. Two of those were Eric and his roommate Daniel Nissman, who lived across the hall.

Now one of the reasons Chris and I got along is that we had similar ideas on how to keep the dorm room, which in our case was neat and tidy. Let’s just say Eric and Daniel had a different room aesthetic.

One of Eric’s friends was David Epley, who now tours the world as Doktor Kaboom. For Halloween David dressed up as me.

I think Eric was a punk rocker.

After I graduated in 1984 and started my rocky college career (I’ve been kicked out of some of the best colleges in the country), I lost touch with Eric, but I do remember reaching out to him right after I got married. He, on the other hand was moving to Alaska of all places.

For some reason I thought that Eric had been military police. I recently met a person in my town who was an MP and so I reached out to Eric to see if he was in the same company. His texted reply serves as a great summary of 1993 to 2000 or so.

So he was never an MP but he did spend time in Iraq during the Iraq war. There are at least two stories involving him that reached a wider audience, but those are his stories and I don’t feel it is my place to share them.

We reconnected in person around 2005. I was living in Pittsboro and he had become a Durham police officer. I had never had a friend who was also a cop, and through Eric I got to experience a little of that through ride-alongs. He worked 12 hour shifts and since I figured it would be cooler to ride the night shift, about once a year I would go to Durham and spend half a day with him, from dusk until dawn the next day.

I don’t have any pictures of him in uniform. Being in law enforcement Eric kept a very low profile on social media platforms, for a number of good reasons, and to honor that I refrained from taking pictures of people on our rides.

I can’t stress enough how nice Eric was as a person, and while he carried that through as a police officer there was definitely a “Cop Eric” versus “Eric Eric”. We could be goofing off in the squad car telling stories when he’d have to go to work, and then it was all business.

I did this at least five times over his career, but the earlier rides were more fun. I can remember him pulling into a school yard late one night and the lights caught a couple of teenagers obviously up to no good. As they took off running he hit the car’s speaker and said simply “don’t make me chase you” and they both immediately stopped. He would tell me repeatedly that his main job was “guns and drugs” and the focus was to get them off the street. I was never there when they did a big bust of any sort, but one of the more boring rides was when he caught a person with a small amount of cocaine and we ended up spending three hours at the magistrate’s office.

Since Eric was very talented at pretty much anything he did, he got promoted, and the rides weren’t as cool when he was supervising versus doing the work. We’d often get to the scene of an incident long after it was all over. But even then he showed a lot of care and compassion for those officers who reported to him, and he would tell me stories of what he was doing to make his team great police with a big focus on keeping them safe. Keeping people safe was what he was all about.

During this time he got married to Autumn, an amazing woman he met at work. She is a nurse and I know a few cop/nurse couples who met on the job. They moved to Saxapahaw, which was fairly close to me, along with their two kids Finn and McKenna. I would visit on occasion, and I especially liked the parties that had a lot of cops and nurses in attendance. A few of them I met on my rides but it was also nice to see them socially and out of uniform.

Eric also demonstrated another talent: painting. I forget if it was for Finn or McKenna but he painted this jungle mural in their bedroom. It was really good. I swear I took a picture of it but I can’t find it now.

I also looked to Eric when I was in a bad car accident in 2019. He was able to help me understand the process from the cop side of things. Those are the oldest texts I have from him on my current handset. We kept in touch while he was working through the pandemic and he told me in 2020 that he had two more years of being a cop before he planned to retire.

I forget when I found out about his cancer. I think it was 2023, about the same time he moved into his parents’ house, which was about two miles from his old place (his parents had downsized and moved to another place). At this point in time he was already supposed to have died from the disease, but as usual he kept beating the odds.

This was about the same time I moved to Asheboro, which was an hour farther away from him, and so I didn’t get to see him as often as I would have liked. But every time I was in the area I would make a point for us to get together, usually getting breakfast or lunch in Graham.

When I had asked him about being an MP (in the middle of November) he replied to me while he was in the hospital. He had had some internal bleeding and while he was at Duke Hospital they found some brain lesions. I was going to visit him in the hospital the Friday before Thanksgiving but he got released that Wednesday. He was eager to be with his family over the holiday as they were going to the beach. For my job I have to be out of town the week after Thanksgiving every year, so we made plans to get together when I got back. His last text to me still brings me to tears.

I think it is the only time he ever lied to me.

My last text to him was on the 18th. I was going to be in Pittsboro and wanted to see him. Of course he didn’t reply, having passed on the 13th, but long delays in messaging were pretty common with Eric so I didn’t worry.

I’m a firm believer that no one is ever truly gone as long as they are remembered. My life is richer having known him, and he will not be forgotten as long as I am alive.