For more than three decades, they referred to each other as brothers, even though they weren't — at least not by blood. When they started out, one was a doctor from Virginia establishing himself in his new community of Boise, and the other a scrawny, redheaded 11-year-old boy who never met his father and was getting into fights.
Karl Watts didn't know then, when they were matched in 1989 through Boise's Big Brothers Big Sisters program, that the troubled, bullied boy would grow up to be a 6-foot-2 Green Beret veteran — one who would head into the heart of a war zone as a volunteer training Ukrainian civilians for combat.
He also couldn't know that Nick Maimer would die there, with Watts listed as his next of kin.
“We were brothers in every sense of the word,” Watts told the Idaho Statesman.
More than 100 people came together at Maimer's recent memorial in Boise that included the formal presentation of an American flag to his mother and other military honors, and a subsequent celebration of life. All seemed to have stories about a time when Maimer threw a surprise birthday for a friend, offered free music studio time to another or planned some elaborate prank.
Loved ones remembered Maimer, 45, for having close friendships across all different spheres of life and big dreams of becoming an internationally known DJ. Yet that Maimer is the same man who would set out for Ukraine to help the nation defend its…
