Two breweries in Manitowoc have stepped up to help the family of a young girl who died in a car crash earlier this month.
Skylar Rose Beattie passed away on January 5th at the age of 8-years-old following a vehicle crash.
We spoke with Paul Hoffman, who is the founder and owner of PetSkull Brewing in Manitowoc, where Skyler’s mother Krystle Beattie worked part-time.
“She just came into work [that day], and I hadn’t seen her in a while,” Hoffman recalled from the day of the accident. “About 45 minutes into her shift, she got a call from the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office that her daughter was in a car accident with her dad and was in an ambulance on her way up to Green Bay. That was…that was brutal.”
Hoffman explained that when he had not heard from Krystle by the end of the day he assumed the worst, which ended up being true.
So, both he, and Will Schneider at Sabbatical Brewing where Krystle also bartended part-time in-between shifts at her nursing job, decided independently to hold fundraisers for the member of the Manitowoc brewing family.
The event at PetSkull was held on January 8th, where the bartenders agreed to donate all of their tips to Skylar’s family, and Hoffman agreed to match that donation 100%.
While we did not ask how much was raised, Hoffman said, “I knew that if I put a request out to the community…I knew it was going to be great, but this probably tripled what I thought was going to come in. My match is probably three times more than what I figured, and I’m ok with that.”
Hoffman said that he intends on getting all the money donated to Krystle this week, however, “Money still keeps coming in! Every time I come in here, the bartenders are like ‘Paul we got another $20 for Krystle.’ ‘Paul we got another $30 for Krystle.’…If you didn’t have a chance to donate, and still want to…throw it in there…and we will make sure she gets that.”
Hoffman, who has always had high praise for the Manitowoc community, continued to shower praise on the generosity he saw.
He said he is not sure if Krystle will ever come back to work for him, but he hopes “she remembers [forever] how great the Manitowoc Community was.”
