Memorial for CEO shot in uptown Charlotte set for National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
John Holaday, the prominent CEO who was shot and killed in Charlotte while walking to a business meeting last month, will be remembered during a memorial service at the National Cathedral, according to his family.
The service is scheduled for 10 a.m. Oct. 30.
The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., is often used for burial and remembrance services for prominent Americans, including four U.S. presidential state funerals and seven presidential memorial services. The cathedral seats about 4,000 people, according to cathedral.org.
Holaday, who was visiting Charlotte on the day he was fatally hit by a stray bullet in uptown, was from Bethesda, Md., but his company, DisposeRx, is based in Sanford, North Carolina. The company helps people eliminate potentially addictive or dangerous drugs from their medicine cabinets, particularly opioids, The Charlotte Observer previously reported.
The upcoming memorial service for Holaday at the National Cathedral was arranged by his family, according to Holaday’s colleague, William Simpson, president of DisposeRx.
“It is an amazing honor,” Simpson told The Charlotte Observer on Thursday. “It’s a remarkable tribute, and John was a remarkable man.”
Early work on opioid research
Addiction to opioids and the prescription pill health crisis has been a national issue in recent years.
But Holaday had been working on helping people combat addiction for more than five decades.
Holaday started in 1966 with soldiers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland who’d returned from the Vietnam War addicted to heroin, Simpson told the Observer.
“Over the course of his career, he envisioned and brought to life products and therapies that directly lessened the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people,” wrote his loved ones in Holaday’s obituary, published in the Washington Post over the weekend.
“John Holaday was a rare combination of many things — a business man with the heart of a philanthropist; an activist; a man of deep passion and compassion; a scientist; a US Army Captain; a university professor; an entrepreneur; a founder and CEO of three public companies,” the obituary states.
Holaday also was a father to two sons, married to Dori Holaday for 27 years “and a tireless champion of the underdog,” his obituary says.
At DisposeRx, his friends and colleagues “will champion John’s legacy with the work we continue to do” — the work Holaday started so many decades ago, Simpson said.
His family wrote in Holaday’s obituary: “His tragic death as an innocent victim of gun violence on October 4, 2019 marked the untimely end of a life that still had so much to give to so many.”
One person, a 16-year-old, has been charged with murder in connection with Holaday’s death.
This story was originally published October 24, 2019 at 5:51 PM with the headline "Memorial for CEO shot in uptown Charlotte set for National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.."