Activist’s passion, path extinguished
He was always an adventurer for social justice. Robert Grodt’s mother has a photo of her boy at 3 years old, grinning in a green Robin Hood costume while he holds a tiny bow. Ready for action, even back then, Tammy Grodt says.
That spirit led Robert Grodt through campaigning for human rights in Santa Cruz, working as a medic for Occupy Wall Street — and this month, with scarcely anything that could be called military training, fighting the Islamic State in Syria.
It was there, on the outskirts of Raqqa, as he and a Kurdish militia squad tried to take back the city from the terrorist group’s forces, that the 28-yearold Mountain View native lost his life. He was killed by an improvised explosive device during a firefight.
The end wasn’t exactly surprising to those who loved Grodt. Shocking and heartbreaking, yes — but not a total surprise.
“Everybody knew it was a possibility my son could die. It was on all our minds,” said Tammy Grodt, who lives in Simi Valley (Ventura County). “But with Robert, there was no stopping him when he set his mind to doing something. If he knew it was right, he would do it.”
Last year, she said, going to Syria to fight Islamic State militants became his latest right thing to do.
“He started finding out about the Kurdish people, and finally said to me, ‘I’m going to Syria because people need help there,’ ” Grodt said. “It was not a spur-of-the-moment thing, like, ‘Oh, yay, let’s go play war games.’ No, he was serious.
“I couldn’t stop him ever in his life from doing what he thought was right. He was born with purpose.”
Grodt was living in New York state with his partner and 4year-old daughter when he left
in February to join up with the YPG, a Kurdish acronym for People’s Protection Units, a U.S.-backed ground force of lightly armed soldiers fighting the Islamic State.
It was the result of months of study and contemplation, his mother said. He’d heard about the cause through friends, on the Internet, in his liberal political circles, and the more he learned, the more he was outraged by the Islamic State’s crusade to wipe out entire populations and subjugate Middle East society to a rigid religious rule.
The YPG, with a socialist pull reminiscent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade’s pull in the 1930s Spanish Civil War, has attracted more than 500 Americans like Grodt in the past few years, according to news accounts from the region.
The young man may have been dedicated to nonviolence as a protester for liberal causes, but he wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with firearms. “He didn’t own a gun, but he had worked at a paintball range once and shot guns at a shooting range before he left,” Tammy Grodt said.
His plan was to take the YPG’s short military training course, do some community organizing and fighting, and then come home in August, friends and family said.
Joining up with the YPG “was not a surprise,” said his best friend since kindergarten, Corey Mynatt of Simi Valley, who shared Grodt’s sense of social justice but opted for a more conventional career, as a technology consultant. “Going to Syria was exactly the sort of thing he would do — fighting for the freedom of an underrepresented group. It’s exactly who Bobby was.”
Grodt was born in Mountain View to Tammy and Wayne Grodt, and the family moved to Simi Valley five years later. His father is an aerospace engineer, his mother an early childhood educator. Robert was one of their six children.
“We volunteer a lot for good causes, like art education,” Tammy Grodt said. That family impulse took hold early for her son. “By the time he was in elementary school he wanted to be a microbiologist and cure AIDS,” she said. “He was always problem solving.”
After graduating from high school, Robert Grodt did hands-on work for groups including the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2009 and 2010 he wound up working in Santa Cruz for Grassroots Campaigns, a group that organizes for causes including LGBT equality and international human rights.
“He was one of our team leaders, a very successful canvasser because he could talk to anyone,” said Grodt’s boss there, Spike Murphy. “He had a big heart, incredible empathy for anyone he talked to. Would give the shirt off his back, literally, even if he was cold.”
Grodt put his motivations for going to Syria in a video that YPG posted this week along with an announcement of his July 6 death. In the clip he is referred to by his Kurdish nom de guerre, Demhat Goldman, and is seen sitting in a field, wearing camouflage and holding an AK-47 assault rifle.
“My reason for joining the YPG was to help the Kurdish people in their struggle for autonomy in Syria and elsewhere ... also to do my best to fight Daesh (the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State) and help create a more secure world,” Grodt says, his voice so relaxed it’s almost serene.
“For my family ... just know that I love you all, and there’s a lot that goes unsaid,” he adds. “To my daughter, I’m sorry that I’m not there.”
His daughter, Tegan, garnered media attention four years ago when she became the product of Grodt’s last major adventure in social justice.
Grodt hitchhiked from Simi Valley to New York in 2011 to join the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park as a volunteer medic, and when another protester was peppersprayed by a police officer he rushed to her aid. Videos of that pepper-spraying went viral, and soon the other protester — schoolteacher Kaylee Dedrick — and Grodt had fallen in love.
The New York tabloids made much of the romance and dubbed the resulting Tegan “Occu-baby.” After the Occupy movement petered out, the family settled just outside Albany, N.Y. Grodt was working there as a produce manager at a local market when he took a leave to go to Syria.
“Kaylee loved him and supported him, and is doing pretty well under the circumstances,” said family friend Justin Woodruff, who fought with a similar militia in East Timor in the 1990s and has started a GoFundMe site to raise money for Tegan’s upbringing. “Once in a generation or so there is a conflict with something that is honest-to-God truly evil, and ISIS is that now. Robert understood that.”
Tammy Grodt said the family intends to “try to guide Tegan to activism as she gets older — but a little closer to home.
“We want her to know what a good person her father was ... and we know something good will come out of all of this,” she said. “We aren’t quite sure what it is. Maybe it will be some incredible thing Tegan accomplishes in her life.
“I just don’t know. But his spirit is in her.”