Hersey student gets scholarship in her brother's honor

When Anna Maria Niezgoda applied for a scholarship with The Matthew Freeman Project, she was thinking of her older brother.

The John Hersey High School senior wrote about the last time she saw her brother, Staff Sgt. Przemyslaw Mazur, on New Year's Eve when she was 13. The last time she heard his voice was when he called from his Army base in North Carolina on her 14th birthday. He had recently returned from a deployment in Iraq, but was suffering from PTSD worse than his family in Mount Prospect realized. On May, 9, 2011, Mazur, 33, took his own life.

Niezgoda spilled out her feelings about her loss to the application committee for the Matthew Freeman Memorial Scholarship, not realizing it was meant for siblings of military members who had been killed in combat. Organizers were so moved by her words that they created a new scholarship - The Captain Matthew Freeman, USMC, Memorial Sibling Scholarship for Siblings of Combat Related Suicide Loss - and awarded Niezgoda the first $1,000 prize during an assembly at Hersey High School on Wednesday.

"My brother would be so proud of me if he was here right now," Niezgoda said through tears after receiving the award.

At first it was hard for Niezgoda to understand how her much-older brother would no longer be around.

"I didn't know how to process it, it wasn't real," she said. "Any loss of a family member is traumatic. If it's sickness you can see it coming, but we didn't have a chance to say goodbye."

Niezgoda will use the $1,000 scholarship toward her education at Purdue University in the fall. She plans to become a nurse, following in the footsteps of her brother, who was a medic in the U.S. Army.

"It means so much. My parents are both immigrants and work so hard to send me to school so anything helps," Niezgoda said. "And the fact that this is for my brother and I know he is looking down on me as I go to school."

Matthew Freeman was born in Lake Forest and raised in the Chicago suburbs and in Georgia before he went to the U.S. Naval Academy. Freeman was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2009 and his family later started a memorial scholarship for Gold Star siblings to continue their education.

Freeman's aunt, Jo Ann Avellone, presented Niezgoda with the scholarship on Wednesday morning.

"You are doing something so brave," Avellone told her, because Niezgoda isn't afraid to talk about the loss of her brother.

Niezgoda said more people need to feel comfortable with the subject because each day 22 veterans take their own lives.

"A lot of people have PTSD and don't want to talk about it," Niezgoda said. "It's important for people to know it's OK to not be OK."