The Inspiration

A spirit of goodness that continues to guide us forward comes from a 19-year-old known to his friends simply as “Rizzo” and to his mom as “sunshine”. Jonathan Rizzo had an energy and positive outlook on life that people liked to be around.

Jonathan was instinctively drawn towards people that needed help and this passion for helping others prompted his father Mike to refer to him as “a herder of stray cats”. His parents never knew whom Jonathan might bring home for dinner but they had learned to expect to be ready to set another plate at the dinner table. “He made an impact on a lot of people because he wanted to help”, recalls one of his closest friend’s Joe Scorzoni.

Jonathan spent 4 years volunteering at Christmas in the City in Boston and had a passion to end the Chinese occupation of Tibet. He routinely extended a hand and lent an ear to the downtrodden, ignored and disadvantaged of the world when all too many of us simply passed by. His generous nature and magnetic energy may have been atypical for his age, but he was by all other accounts a typical teenager with a mischievous side that landed him in a few predicaments that “his parents need not know about”, according to his friend Andrew Foley. Jonathan’s friend Alex Constantine remembers her best times with Jonathan at the Rizzo house and his uncanny ability to make her laugh “even at the most inappropriate times.”

Like many teenagers, Jonathan and 3 of his friends had decided to get a tattoo although he became less excited about the idea when he found out that needles would be involved since they generally caused him to faint. Jonathan died before he could get that tattoo, but his 3 friends thought it a most appropriate way to honor their friend. The tattoo Jonathan had picked out before his death was of the Celtic cross, which is considered a solar symbol and the source of light and ultimate energy. The 4 points of the cross represent the 4 directions and the 4 elements, but to Joe and his friends, it represents the four of them forever bound by the circle that represents the sun. “Sunshine” is indeed a fitting nickname for Jonathan.

Through Jonathan’s life we can learn how to be better people. Through his death we also learn that the spirit of goodness can overcome the force of evil. Jonathan’s light continues to burn more brightly than ever before through his family, friends and even those he never met.

His close friend Joe believes that if Jonathan could send one message it would be that “people have to take care of each other and everything else will take care of itself.” It is a most fitting way of honoring his memory, renewing his spirit and energizing our own.