LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WHAS11) -- Before he was Officer Nick Rodman with the Louisville Metro Police Department, he was simply Nick, a student who roamed the halls of Holy Cross High School 12 years ago.
"There are certain kids that you remember," Holy Cross Principal Danielle Wiegandt, a former teacher, said.
"I guess all teachers have kids that stand out for you and become some of your all-time favorites, and Nick would be one of mine," Sister Maryann Tarquinio, the campus minister and former principal, said. "He was everything we hoped for in a Holy Cross student."
Tarquinio, who was the principal when Rodman was a student, said Rodman was one of her students in an advanced chemistry class.
"He was excellent," she said. "I think he had a 98 average when he finished my class."
Rodman made a name for himself as a stellar student in the classroom and as an athlete on the gridiron, which is where he met his best friend, Eric Titus.
"We worked out all leading up to freshman year football season, and from then on, we've been friends ever since," Titus said.
"You rarely saw one without the other in high school," Wiegandt said. "They balanced each other. Eric was a little bit quieter and Nick seemed to be the little bit more rambunctious one, but they were both very intelligence."
"Very good students and conscientious, but they also had a little bit of impishness in them that they would have a good time," Tarquinio said.
While many high school friendships fade after graduation, Rodman and Titus withstood the test of time, staying friends through adulthood. Titus said Rodman was the best man at his wedding and watched him transform from a high school student to a police officer, and more importantly, a husband and father.
"We got to see him in his high school days as the silly Nick. We got to have late nights with him in college when he came and went out with us at UK," Ashley Titus, Eric's wife, said. "But the best Nick that we got to know was the Nick that was a husband and a father."
Nick will be remembered, captured in photos printed onto the glossy pages of old Holy Cross yearbooks, but for his friends and others who knew him, his legacy is more than just ink of a page.
"As an officer, he protected the city. And as a father, he would do anything for his family," Titus said. "Don't forget him."