Mom’s Son Mysteriously Died in His Sleep. Now She Keeps His Memory Alive by Helping Other Kids
“His spirit is still around making things happen,” Nikki Mark said
Shortly into their two-hour drive to a San Diego soccer tournament, 12-year-old Tommy Mark turned to his mom, Nikki, and began asking questions about the meaning of life.
“Is it possible to go to sleep and not wake up?” Tommy asked, as Nikki, 54, tried to reassure him that he didn’t need to worry about that at his age. “And then a couple minutes later, he said, ‘It must be really hard for a parent to lose a child.’”
Three days later, those questions took on a deeper significance when Nikki walked into Tommy’s bedroom at their Los Angeles home in April 2018 to wake him for soccer practice and made a horrifying discovery. “He was never late for his workouts,” she says. “But he didn’t wake up. He was gone, and suddenly everything changed.”
In the aftermath of Tommy’s death from an undiagnosed heart condition that specialists still struggle to explain, Nikki started a journey of healing by raising over $2.6 million and building two state-of-the-art soccer fields open to the public free of charge.
“The fields aren’t just a way to honor Tommy,” she says. “They also fulfill a need for a city that doesn’t have enough playing fields for kids and adults.”
In the days before his passing, Tommy — an elite player who at age 8 told his parents, “By the time I’m 15, I’m going to Europe to play” — had complained of chest pains. His doctor wrote it off as “growing pains.” Nikki recalls, “Pediatric cardiologists told us they’ve never seen anything like it.”
On the day Tommy died, as friends began filling up the home Nikki shares with her husband, Doug, 64, an entertainment lawyer, and younger son Donovan, 16, the shell-shocked businesswoman — she has launched several start-ups — wondered how she would move on with her life.
Then she remembered a city-owned plot of land near their home that had been empty for nearly 20 years and thought: “Let’s build a soccer field for Tommy.”
Before long, she created the TM23 Foundation, named for Tommy’s jersey number, and started attending community meetings to convince skeptical neighbors and the city to support her plan.
After the field opened in 2021 and began attracting thousands of players each week, the administrators of the 115-year-old Los Angeles social services agency Vista Del Mar, which offers services to underserved youth and foster children, reached out to Nikki. “We want a Tommy’s Field too,” she says.
By August of 2023, the new field had been built, funded by everything from profits from lemonade stands set up by Tommy’s friends to generous philanthropists. Nikki’s friends aren’t surprised by what she’s been able to achieve. “Anything she puts her mind to, she accomplishes,” says college friend Tamara Jensen. “She’s just that kind of a force.”
Now, Nikki, whose book Tommy’s Field: Love, Loss, and the Goal of a Lifetime was published in January, is working on a third soccer field in downtown L.A. “It feels like Tommy is orchestrating all of this,” she says proudly. “His spirit is still around making things happen.”
