IN MEMORY OF A HERO I NEVER GOT TO MEET

SARA AN ANGEL WHO TOUCHED MANY......


I will tell you why I am so interested in your project. My daughter, Sarah passed away this weekend. Please read the attached, and you will understand. Sarah was born without arms and legs, but lived a great life for 28 plus years, married and happy in New York City. Sarah was a fighter as you will see below.

My heart goes out to you for what you do. I am sure you feelings are the same as mine when you lose one of your children.

May God be with you in your journeys.

Barry

Young champion of the disabled dies

Former Byrd High student earned national award for her volunteer work

April 13, 2006

Sarah Hoffman at age 16 in 1994. (Times File Photo)

FUNERAL
Services for Sarah Hoffman Snyder will be held at 2 p.m. April 22 at St. Matthias Episcopal Church, 3301 St. Matthias Drive in Shreveport.

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By Teddy Allen
teddy@gannett.com

Sarah Hoffman Snyder, born with no arms and limited lower extremities yet a champion for those with disabilities, fooled a lot of people in her life, including her own mom.

"Who would have thought that someone with such an immense physical disability would be able to fly as far as she flew, to travel as many miles as she did, to be as capable as she was? Certainly not her mother," said Mary Ellen Hoffman of her daughter, who as a C.E. Byrd student received one of only six national 1994 Special Achievement Awards for her help of the disabled.

Surrounded by much of her immediate family, Snyder, 27, died Sunday in New York City of complications from liver failure. She had been hospitalized a week and had been in intensive care for two days, her mother said.

Snyder had lived in New York since 2001, when she married Jason Joseph Snyder, at the time a member of the U.S. Navy and stationed in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

"I think so many people (in Shreveport) played a role in Sarah being able to be who she was," Hoffman said. "They were touched by Sarah, and she was touched by them. She's gone, but we want everybody to remember the remarkable things she had the courage to be. She had virtually no limbs; it says a lot that she had the courage to face each day."

By age 15, she'd already shared more than 2,000 hours of herself at Schumpert Medical Center as a Junior Volunteer. As a Byrd senior in the fall of 1995, she wrote a Letter to the Editor of The Times questioning why the new two-story Science Technology building at her school had no elevator.

"We have a mayor in a wheelchair (Shreveport's Bo Williams), the Americans with Disabilities Act and 12 disabled students enrolled at Byrd," she wrote, "and all we got was the shaft."

"She was so independent," said Melanie Samuel, now a Byrd office employee who was the "child-specific aid" for Snyder for three and a half of the teen's four years at Byrd.

"That was just a title because she really didn't need me. Her support system was so great, half of the time I didn't know where she was," Samuel said. "She was normal. She was just normal. She got into trouble, she did the same things any other kid would do. And once she got the swing of it, that was it: she didn't really need me. She's unforgettable."

"She'd say things from the back seat of the car like, 'Scoot the seat up, mama; I don't have enough leg room,'" Hoffman said. "She was funny, curious, personable. She had the same dreams as other people; she just had limits and had to learn how to get around them ...

"Now she's limitless. She's not tethered to this Earth by any of the things that held her ... she's soaring. Her fight is over."

©The Times

April 13, 2006