– Every year, thousands of pounds of trash makes its ways into our oceans –

This trash ends up affecting our marine life and water supply, and the problems gets worse and worse every year. Fortunately, someone decided to do something about it. Two well-known Youtubers, MrBeast and Mark Rober, decided to come together on a project called #TEAMSEAS where they plan to clean 30 million pounds of trash out of the oceans by 2022.  

OCEAN CONSERVANCY, INC is helping to coordinate the logistics of this fund-raiser, and all transaction fees for the donations for this effort are being covered by Youtube per Youtube’s website.  

An Unexpected Turn of Events

When I saw the MrBeast and Mark Rober videos concerning this worthwhile effort, I almost immediately thought about my friend Patrick Stephens.  

  Patrick is an amazing motorcycle stunt rider from the D/FW area. For years he had been putting on stunt shows, and some of stunt shows helped to raise money for local food banks.

After 9-11, the economy was adversely affected and requests for stunts shows soon dried up. Patrick then decided to focus more on his comedy career, and recently decided to create his own stunt school to teach people how to do wheelies on their motorcycles.

I thought this would be perfect for Patrick because he could do some really cool stunts while promoting the Teamseas fundraiser. After this fundraiser had ended, I had hoped that Patrick would then be able to continue to do various stunts to promote other things for MrBeast and any other companies that might be interested in utilizing his talents.  

Well, that was the plan…

After the pandemic, most of the posts on Facebook tended to be rather depressing, and so I had modified my Facebook check ins from several times a day to once every few weeks.

For the idea I had for Patrick, I wrote up some ideas I had for him to promote #teamseas. To make it easier on him, I decided to modify one of his old stunt pictures to serve as a meme that he could easily use to promote the fundraiser.

When I did a Google search on his Patrick’s, I noticed a cartoon like picture of a tombstone with the words “RIP Patrick Stephens rider”. I didn’t think too much about it, at first, since when I search my own name for graphics, SEVERAL obituary entries tend to pop up.

But then I kept looking until I came across a graphic that had his picture and his birthday linked up to a recent date for this year. That is when I got worried. I clicked on the picture, and sure enough, it was a GoFundMe set up to raise money for his funeral expenses.

Patrick Stephens had been killed in a motorcycle accident

The sad irony was, with all of the crazy stunts that I have seen him do on a motorcycle, like do a front flip on his bike, or set himself on fire while riding, the accident that took his life was simply another vehicle making a left turn right in front of Patrick, while he was riding his motorcycle down a street.

It took several days for me to deal with all of this. Finally, I made the decision to move forward. I went ahead and made a donation to #teamseas in his honor and posted a tweet up on one of my Twitter accounts.

– Keeping the legend alive for years to come –

If anyone wishes to make a donation on the teamseas.org website, in the space for ‘Teams’, please list your donation under Patrick Stephens Freestyle.

This really is a worthy cause, and hopefully a fundraiser that will continue past the end of this year, because clean water affects everything and everyone on this amazing planet. EG