BY DENIS J. O’MALLEY

Times-Shamrock Writer

If Gilberto Alvarez was to be remembered appropriately, it would have to be done with the taste of Jack Daniels whiskey on the tongue.

“I got another bottle here,” called one man among the crowd of about 30 friends of Alvarez and Joshua Rogers, 30, ofNew Milford, the two men gunned down Saturday onPine Ayre Road, for a candlelight vigil onSteam Hollow Road, less than a mile from the scene of the crime Wednesday night.

“Here’s to Gilbert,” another called, once he got one of the flasks floating around the group gathered to remember, mourn and celebrate the two inseparable Army veterans around a tree outfitted as a shrine, crowded with twinkling candlelights, flowers, crosses and keepsakes.

The two men were killed onPine Ayre Roadon Saturday, just a few minutes’ drive from the gathering, where Lloyd Thomas, 45, allegedly shot them both in what state police say he maintained was self-defense.

The circumstances that led to the shooting, as well as the purpose of the two victims’ presence at the Thomas property, have not been revealed.

Thomas is currently in the Susquehanna County Correctional Facility without bail awaiting a Wednesday preliminary hearing to decide if the criminal homicide case will go to trial.

“It’s shocking,” Judith Carvin said of the double murder in a town where “everybody knows everybody.”

“I can’t believe someone around this small area would do something like that,” she said.

The only quality more striking about Alvarez than his appreciation of good times was his insistence that he not be alone in them.

Michael McDonald remembers the first time he met him, just two weeks ago.

He was upset that night and had just met Alvarez when he got into a car with him and another friend.

“As soon as I’m in the car he’s all ‘What’s the matter?” McDonald recalled Wednesday.

Alvarez gripped his new friend’s knee, teasingly mimed the words to Adele’s “Someone like you” playing on the radio and all but insisted McDonald put his troubles away.

“He was trying to get me to laugh,” he said. “He was a good man.”

He had that way about him, Carvin recalled. Charming, flirtatious, always sweet and “boy, if you started crying he’d get you laughing,” she said.

He only relocated to the area less than a year ago, friends said. He came for work on natural gas drilling sites, where he served as a “rigger,” assembling and disassembling heavy machinery for transport, said Charles Wayman of Hallstead.

The closest thing he had to family in the area was Rogers, the man alongside whom he served his country in northernAfghanistanand became inseparable from once he came toSusquehannaCountylooking for work.

But in the short time he spent in the area before his untimely death Saturday, Alvarez came to have a family of his own.

“We’re Gilbert’s family inPennsylvania,” said Melissa Sharer, of Hallstead. “He didn’t have anybody up here, but he had us.”

Jennifer Hazlett-Gray met Alvarez his first night inPennsylvanialast summer whenRogerscame into the Harmony Creek Pub and asked her if she had seen his friend.

They had had a “tiff” and had gotten separated, but before long she was serving the two vets onceRogersreturned to the pub with his friend in tow.

“He came to find him. He wanted to make sure his friend was OK,” she said. “They were always like that.”

Rogers’ father, George, of Montrose, arrived at the vigil just as darkness set in.

After a handful of voices came together in a brief rendition of “Amazing Grace,” he knelt down in the candles’ glow then stood to jot a note of his own amongst the remembrances scribbled on a poster board tacked to the tree.

His son was a man with many different interests – music, poetry, the outdoors – “trying to figure out what he wanted to do,”Rogerssaid.

“He was a good kid,” he said. “He and Gilbert both.”