Mountain Brook grad creates sculpture to honor fallen US Marine

A 23-year-old alumnus of Mountain Brook High School was the sculptor for a bronze bust of a fallen U.S. soldier unveiled recently at Aldridge Gardens in Hoover.

Bryce Martinez, who graduated in 2012 and now lives in Irondale while he finishes his senior year as an art student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, received a presidential summer research scholarship that paid for him to create the bust.

The piece, which weighs nearly 100 pounds, is a likeness of Thomas Rivers, a Marine from Hoover who died in Afghanistan in April 2010 at the age of 22.

Martinez said he spent several months working on the bust this summer and fall and said it was his largest undertaking yet.

“It was a great learning experience for professional practices and working with this medium,” he said.

He met several times with Rivers’ mother, Charon Rivers, to make sure the bust resembled her son as closely as possible.

“That was the most important part of the project: getting the likeness correct,” Martinez said. “It was a real demanding project, but it was very much worth it.”

Rivers’ parents said Martinez put a lot of work into the bust and did a wonderful job with it.

It was one of two busts unveiled Nov. 7 at Aldridge Gardens along with a new Veterans Memorial Arbor that stretches across the dam at the gardens. The other was of Ryan Winslow, a 19-year-old Marine from Hoover who was killed in Iraq in April 2006.

George and Marynell Winslow, the parents of Ryan Winslow, said their son’s bust was provided not long after his death through a “Bronzes of the Brave” project led by Sam Patterson of Memphis. However, they’ve never really had a good place to display it, George Winslow said.

“It’s been in Ryan’s room, sitting on a table for nine years,” he said.

A third bronze bust is being created to honor Andrew Hand, another Hoover resident who was killed in Afghanistan in July 2010. It is being created by a retired Marine colonel in Tuscaloosa, Lee Busby, and should be cast in December, Davis said.

Rivers’ father, Tom Rivers, said projects such as the bronze busts and the Veterans Memorial Arbor give hope for the future of the United States. 

More than 200 people were at the Nov. 7 ceremony at Aldridge.