The Hopple family was trapped inside their home with no electricity for a week during an ice storm seven years ago.

To entertain themselves, the youngest son, Tyler, and the oldest daughter, Alyce, invented a rhyming game so fun they couldn’t stop rhyming three days after the family’s power came back on.

Tyler Hopple, a junior computer information systems major, died March 17.

As a child, Tyler loved “Power Rangers” comic books and “Spider-Man,” Alyce, a USI alumna said.

“He would usually just listen to what (his three older siblings) wanted to do and support us in that, but he didn’t really identify a career path in his own life,” she said.

Tyler jokingly picked out jobs such as being a sumo wrestler to make his family laugh, Alyce said.

“He was really good at quickly getting to know a person or in our situation getting to know us very in depth,” she said.

Alyce said the most important thing to Tyler was forming and maintaining strong relationships with the people he cared about.

“I think he recognized the good in people and wanted to demonstrate that he was at their level and a good person too,” she said.

When Madison Eaton first met Tyler, she noticed how kind and genuine he was, she said. This impression only grew stronger the longer she knew him.

“He was purposeful to always smile and talk with me, even if it was simply in passing on campus,” the junior nursing major said.

The two often played volleyball together and took an art class together their sophomore year.

“As crazy as it sounds, I could not remember the primary colors. He told me he was able to remember because they were three of the Power Rangers colors,” Eaton said. “Since then, anytime I have to remember the primary colors, I think of Tyler and the Power Rangers.”

Hannah McNeely met Tyler last summer when she began working at Target.

“He worked in the back room and one day I was throwing stuff away back there and we stopped and just started talking about documentaries randomly and it was just fun,” the junior English major said. “He said that he preferred history documentaries and I thought that was cool.”

The two bonded over Marvel and tattoos, McNeely said.

“He had a Spider-Man tattoo and when I first met him, he had just gotten an octopus tattoo,” she said.

Whenever they saw each other at work, Tyler would make a point to talk to McNeely or smile and wave at her, she said.

Tyler nicknamed McNeely “MC Neely” because of her name’s spelling, she said.

“Anytime he would see that I was not happy about work or something, he would come over and say, ‘Hey, MC Neely, keep your head up,’ or just come over and talk to me,” she said. “It was surprising and really heart-wrenching when we found out (he died). He’s missed.”