Keith Lapierre was a former marine who had left a stockbroking career to teach, so he could spend more time with his family.

He had taken up guitar, and had a 22-month-old boy and another child on the way. He could talk a blue streak, and light up a room with his smile.

And he was wise beyond his 29 years.

"He had the wisdom of a 100-year-old man," said his father, Richard Lapierre. "Sometimes, he would give me advice, and I'm the father. Sometimes I felt like we switched places."

Before he went to The Station with his friend, Adrian Krasinskas, who remains in critical condition, he had stopped by A.G. Edwards, his former workplace in Worcester, Mass., to see his old friends and his mother, who also worked there.

"If you would have gone to A.G. Edwards on Friday, you would have seen 50 stockbrokers crying," he said.

He had left behind the stock market to become a fourth-grade teacher because he loved kids, his father said.

The center of his life was his wife, Tammy, and their baby. The two had met on a blind date over ice tea at Tatnuck Bookseller in Worcester, not far from where they lived, and they were married only months later in a ceremony in Chatham, Mass.

"It was love at first sight for both of them," he said. "He loved his wife more than anything on earth, he loved his mother more than anything on earth, he loved his family, he never had a bad mood in his life," his father said.