Adam Pearce, Iraq vet and loyal friend who loved dogs, motorcycles

Adam Pearce served one tour of duty in the city of Fallujah, Iraq.

In March 2005, the Marine returned home, physically unscathed, ready to start anew. The Shiloh High grad had loved motorcycles since childhood. He enrolled and graduated from Wyotech, a Florida school that offers training in motorcycle repair and other specialties. When Pearce returned to the Atlanta area, he worked with a friend who refurbished homes.

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Adam Pearce came home safe from Iraq but was stabbed in Tucker trying to break up a fight.

Relatives say the Iraqi war veteran was a loyal friend. If his buddies were involved in a dust-up, he’d join in regardless, said his father, Drew Pearce of Aurora, Ill.

“He had a fierce loyalty,” his father said, “and I chastised him about that more than once. He would always come to the defense of his friends. Right or wrong. It didn’t matter.”

“He’d been like that since second grade,” said his mother Pam Hayes of Macon.

Early Sunday morning, relatives say Mr. Pearce was stabbed three or four times while trying to stop a fight in the parking lot of the Last Watering Hole, a bar in Tucker off Hugh Howell Road. The incident began when a patron insulted the girlfriend of Mr. Pearce’s friend. The patron, relatives say, said something derogatory about her tattoos. DeKalb County Police have said the killer is a female who remains at large.

The funeral for Adam Andrew Pearce, 28, of Atlanta, will be held 11 a.m. Wednesday at Tom M. Wages Snellville chapel. Graveside services will be held 5 p.m. the same day in Leesburg Cemetery in Leesburg.

Mr. Pearce had wanted to be a Marine since primary school. In high school, he and some buddies made a pact to enlist. Only Mr. Pearce followed through. He was honorably discharged as a sergeant after a tour in the city of Fallujah. There, he’d been part of an artillery unit charged with loading Howitzers.

While he was in the Middle East, his mother spearheaded Operation Santa — a Christmas project to ship boxes to her son’s Marine reserve artillery unit. When the battery returned home, the tattooed dog-lover spoke joyfully of his plan.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he said in a 2005 article that appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “and run the hot water out.”

His father found it tragic that Mr. Pearce survived a tour of duty in one of the war’s flash points, only to meet death in his hometown.

“I’ve seen several articles about Iraq veterans in Chicago who either got shot or stabbed in random street violence,” his father said. “I don’t know if it says something about American society or not. You might be safer in a war zone than on the streets of America.”

Mrs. Hayes said she worried about her son during the war. She said she prayed for her late father to be his guardian angel.

“He had his life ahead of him,” his mother said. “I have not accepted this. It’s a minute-by-minute thing, not a day-by-day thing.”

Besides motorcycles, Mr. Pearce loved pit bulls. He rescued them and currently owned one — “Gator.” One time, his mother said, he stopped on the side of the road to bury a dead dog.

“That was my son,” she said.

Additional survivors are a stepfather, Charles Hayes of Macon; two grandmothers, Mary Shaver of Leesburg and Ruth Pearce of Macon; two brothers, Michael Pearce of Aurora, Ill., and Chris Hayes of St. Augustine, Fla.; and a sister, Amanda Gothard of St. Augustine, Fla.