Shannon Lee McBride was definitely connected to the angels.  She was born on the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel and all other angel and grew up with a family that believed in God's messengers.  Shortly before her death, she reminded her father that "the only time your guarding angel will let you down is when it is your time to go to heaven." She was a healthy young athlete and college student, was active in the Greater Cleveland Police Emerald Society, and had been a tenor drummer with the Greater Cleveland Peace Officer Memorial Society. Shannon marched in parades in Washington, D.C. Ireland and Canada. Because of her awareness of angels as messengers of a loving God, her father has been distributing small gold angel pins in her memory to police, fire, EMS, nurses, and other "special" people.   He prays daily for those who wear the pins asking the angels to protect them in accordance with God's will.  Over the years, many of them have contacted us and related wonderful stories about their own guarding angel experiences. Mostly the stories come in the form of a "voice" that warns of danger or suggests an appropriate course of conduct.  Do you have a personal story about a warning from a guarding angel...if you are a firefighter or a police officer or nurse have an "angel story" to tell - or a story where perhaps you or someone else survived when you should have probably died, would you share it with us? Send us your story at chiefjtm@aol.com.  Thank you very much.  - Copyright, 2010 by J.T. McBride

Here's a list of the Shannon Lee McBride Memorial Endowment Ladies Volleyball Scholarship winners at Lakeland Commmunity College: Ashley Febel (2003); Kristi Tutolo (2004); Angela Farmwald (2005); Amy Clifton (2005); Jessica Van Horn (2005); and Kathryn Coxe (2006).

Shannon loved her Irish heritage a lot, and was a charter member of the Greater Cleveland Police Emerald Society (Irish-American law enforcement association", and also a member of the Greater Cleveland Police Memorial Society.  She had been a drummer in the Memorial Society pipe band, and had marched in many funerals, parades, and memorials including the first two National Conference of Law Enforcement Emerald Socieities Memorial March and Service (founded by her father James and Michael Mitchell) in Washington, D.C.  Through the Emerald Society in Cleveland, Shannon met a local but nationally acclaimed author named Les Roberts who subsequently came to be a family friend.  Just prior to her death and while trying to recover from her surgery, Shannon was reading a Robert's novel entitled "The Irish Sports Pages", which is an extremely interesting Cleveland based mystery featuring our Irish-American community and starring Robert's fictional private investigator - Milan Jacovich.  - Copyright 2006 by J.T. McBride