Scouts keep boy’s memory alive

Friday marks one year since a driver took a right turn that he wasn’t supposed to be behind the wheel to take, and the life of a bright and popular Valley Stream 12-year-old was taken with it. For Zachary Ranftle’s fellow Boy Scouts in Troop 109, grieving his loss has included creating permanent reminders of his life.

“I only knew Zachary for three months before he passed,” said Marlon Polycarpe, 16, who met him when Zachary changed his troop from the one he had been with in Howard Beach. “He was doing a lot for someone who was a new Scout in the troop . . . Right when Zach came, he was getting a lot of things done and he was ranking up really fast.”

Polycarpe installed a memorial monument to Zachary in October outside Grace United Methodist Church, where the troop meets and where Polycarpe attends services. He mounted a plaque on a stone that he placed near the spot where Zachary was struck. It sits a few yards from the makeshift memorial that friends and family fastened to a utility pole at the corner of Merrick Road and South Franklin Avenue, a weathered Teddy bear among the items that are still there.

“His mother said that in the past, she had to always honor him at the corner,” said Polycarpe’s mother, Eleanor. “Now she has a real plaque that she can actually go to and pray to him and honor him.”

On Friday evening, Zachary’s troopmates and Pack 109 members will walk to the Village Green to hold a solemn ceremony where a tree was planted in his memory. The troop was rocked by the tragedy. A grief counselor was brought in to help the boys, and regional Scout leaders helped Troop 109 leaders and parents coordinate support for Zachary’s mother and stepfather, Kathleen and Patrick Flood.

Polycarpe didn’t cry like many of the younger Scouts did at the time, and he said he wondered why he didn’t until the grief counselor explained that people mourn differently. When he undertook his Eagle Scout project earlier this year, his initial idea of creating a veterans’ memorial proved to be difficult to get off the ground, so he decided to switch gears. Zachary’s death had an impact on him — “I was shaken that it can happen to anybody, whenever,” he said — and using his project to honor his troopmate’s memory felt right.

“It made me feel really good to do something like this,” Polycarpe said.

That was apparent as he went about getting the materials for the memorial and the permission to put it on church grounds, said his mother, who said she wasn’t surprised by his choice. “This was genuine,” she said. “This was something I would expect from him . . . I saw the effort he put into it, and just talking to people about the project, he was very passionate about it.”