Friends called him Tater. They also called Tate Lindsey Jr. clever, daredevil, sneaky, generous, loving, crazy, Superman, comedian, energetic, and dedicated.

At 19, Tate was at work when a 300-pound steel door fell on him. Worker's compensation, said his mother, Wendy, “didn’t want to do anything but keep him medicated” with pain pills.

When the price of pills got too high, Tate, like many others, turned to the cheaper narcotic: heroin.

He went through rehab repeatedly. Ironically, he paid for one stay in rehab with a financial settlement from his worker’s compensation case -- the same case that had introduced him to addictive narcotics, his mother said.

Tate was dogged by relapse.

Even so, he still had sober times. He worked construction jobs with his father. He called both of his grandmothers once every week to talk. He stayed on good terms with his ex-wife and the stepfather of his two young sons, and, said his mother, that might have made Tate comfortable that, if something happened to him, his boys would be taken care of.

“Daddy misses you so much,” he wrote to his older son while in rehab. “It’s just a long fight.”

He collapsed Feb. 18 after walking out of a friend’s Boca Raton home, police said. Life support was withdrawn a few days later.

On Tate’s Facebook memorial page, one person quoted from author Daniel Ellsworth: “If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever.”

He was 27.