Friends and family are remembering who Tyre Nichols was after he lost his life at the hands of Memphis police.

Nichols was the definition of a family man. He was the youngest of four children, a devout son to his mother, RowVaughn Wells, and the father of a 4-year-old child.

“Everything he was trying to do was to better himself as a father for his 4-year-old son,” attorney Benjamin Crump said at the family’s news conference, CNN reported.

“When he comes through the door, he wants to give you a hug,” Crump said.

Nichols, who worked at FedEx, loved photographing sunsets (view his photography website here), watching sports and meeting up with friends at Starbucks.

His mother described him as a “good boy” who spent his Sundays preparing for the week and doing his laundry.

“Does that sound like somebody that the police said did all these bad things?” Wells questioned, according to CNN. “Nobody’s perfect OK, but he was damn near.”

Nichols also enjoyed skateboarding, a hobby he had been doing since he was 6.

“You’ve got to put that skateboard down,” his stepfather remembered telling him before his death, per the New York Times. “You’ve got a full-time job now.”

He also had his mother’s name tattooed on his arm.

“That made me proud,” she told the Times. “Most kids don’t put their mom’s name. My son was a beautiful soul.”

Nichols moved to Memphis right before the pandemic and ended up having to stay there, but his mother said that “he was OK with it because he loved his mother,” CNN reported. He previously lived in Sacramento.

One of the friends he met at Starbucks,  Nate Spates Jr., told CNN that Nichols was a “free-spirited person, a gentleman who marched to the beat of his own drum. … He liked what he liked. If you liked what he liked — fine. If you didn’t — fine.” He shared a memory that he has of Nichols in which the 29-year-old met Spates’ wife and 3-year-old. He spoke with his wife and played with their child.

“When we left, my wife said, ‘I just really like his soul. He’s got such a good spirit,’” he said of Nichols. “To speak about someone’s soul is very deep. … I’ll never forget when she said that. I’ll always remember that about him.”

Angelina Paxton, a friend he had known since he was 11, spoke to The Commercial Appeal about his love for sunsets, skateboarding, photography, people and more.

“He was his own person and didn’t care if he didn’t fit into what a traditional Black man was supposed to be in California. He had such a free spirit and skating gave him his wings,” she said. “Tyre was someone who knew everyone, and everyone had a positive image of him because that’s who he was. … Every church knew him; every youth group knew him.”

Paxton collapsed when she found out the news.

“My knees gave out,” she said to Action 5 News. “I just fell because I could not believe that someone with such light was taken out in such a dark way.”

She represented his community in California at the memorial in Memphis.

“There would be a couple thousand people in this room,” she told Action 5 News, referencing if the memorial had been in Sacramento. “He was such an innocent person. He was such a light. This could have been any of us.”

Tyre Nichols