Hundreds of people attended a memorial service Saturday at Colorado State University to honor Thomas Sutherland, a teacher who was held captive in Lebanon for more than six years until he was freed in 1991.

Sutherland died last month in Fort Collins, where he taught animal science at Colorado State University. He was 85.

His widow Jean Sutherland thanked the community for years of support during the hostage situation and in the decades since.

“You gave him life,” Jean told the crowd of nearly 600 who gathered for the memorial at CSU’s Lory Student Center ballroom, The Coloradoan newspaper reported . “You kept him alive and brought him back.”

The service included a Scottish song medley by the Larimer Chorale Chamber Chorus and a performance by members of the Scottish Fiddle Society of Colorado.

Raised on a Scottish dairy farm, Sutherland graduated from Glasgow University in Scotland and moved to the U.S. in the 1950s where he attended graduate school at Iowa State University.

Later he taught for 26 years at CSU before taking leave in 1983 to serve as the dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Science at American University in Beirut. There he was taken hostage by Islamic terrorists in 1985 and held for more than six years.

Sutherland was one of a number of Americans in Lebanon – including Associated Press bureau chief Terry Anderson – who were kidnapped by terrorist groups in the 1980s.