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Missing Marche: A Year Later, The Senseless Death of Kristian Marche Cuts Deep

Published by
DyeStat.com   Aug 14th 2019, 11:44am
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Missing Marche

 

A DyeStat story by Dave Devine



It was a shooting in a city in which shootings occurred all the time, and the power of it lay in its capacity to evoke emotions of outrage and sadness that went beyond race and class and socioeconomics…

- Buzz Bissinger, A Prayer for the City, 1997

 

They gon' remember me, I say remember me. 

- Meek Mill, Dreams and Nightmares

 

_______________


The phone calls started early that awful August morning. 

Most, too early to be answered. 

And so, instead, a series of frantic voicemails, blinking notifications, unanswered text messages. News spreading the way news tends to these days — digitally. Rushed and raw, fractured and half-formed. 

Hitting social media first. 

Tyrone Phillips, home for the summer from Shippensburg University, awake at 4 a.m. and unable to sleep, scrolling through his phone to pass the time. Seeing a spate of posts about a name he recognized. 

Rest in Peace, Marche. 

Stunned, he messaged a friend he’d seen sharing the post. 

You serious? he wrote. 

The reply came almost immediately. 

Yeah, bro. 

In a panic, he tried repeatedly calling Ade Jones-Roundtree, one of his best friends and a former track teammate at Imhotep Charter High School. 

It would be some time before Jones-Roundtree awoke to those messages. 

The same thing was happening all around the metro area. 

Jerome Lowery, who’d coached Phillips and Jones-Roundtree at Imhotep, stirred at his usual time, checked his phone, and struggled to piece together events that had unfolded while he slept.

“I had so many missed calls,” Lowery remembers. “They’d all come in at 4 a.m….5 a.m. The worst phone calls I’ve ever gotten.” 

Erin Tucker, associate head coach for Penn State University’s track and field program, noticed a missed call from a familiar number. When he listened to the voicemail, he was confused to hear little more than crying. 

Jackson Duncan, founder of Focused Athletics, a non-profit that helps Philadelphia inner-city high school athletes, was equally bewildered. 

“I woke up and my phone was blowing up,” he says. 

Clambering from bed, he went to find his son, Zymir Cobbs, a young man he’d met through the Focused Athletics program and adopted two years earlier. Cobbs was another Imhotep kid, a strapping 6-foot-3 defender on the football team. 

“I ran into Zymir’s room,” Duncan recalls, “and my son was sitting there crying, staring at the wall. Just saying, over and over, ‘They killed him. They killed Kristian...’”

 

 

dentist

 

“None of us asked for any of this. We didn’t ask to come together, we just grew tight.”

- Ade Jones-Roundtree, University of Pittsburgh junior 



They called him Marche. 

It was a practical matter, at least on the Imhotep track team. There was a Kristian, a Christian and a Chris, all on the same relay, so they called him by his last name. 

Or they called him BXNK. Which was pronounced “Bank,” but he spelled it with an ‘X,’ because he wanted to be different. 

And he was.  

If nothing else, Kristian Marche was different. 

When he enrolled at Imhotep as a ninth-grader in the fall of 2014, he was already an accomplished football player, but track was a relatively new pursuit. 

Lowery was fresh from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Education, and coming off a decorated career as a long hurdler for the Panthers, when he returned to his hometown and began teaching and coaching at the school that fall. 

The two met when Marche came out for indoor track in the winter. Somewhat reticent when he first showed up, it wasn’t long before Marche’s natural sense of humor began to emerge. 

“He was always laughing and joking,” Lowery says. “He made practice fun to be around.” 

Lowery remembers Marche’s mom, Iona Bryan-Burrell, mentioning that Kristian had always been a giggling, joyful child. 

A kid with an intrinsic ability to make others laugh. 

Bryan-Burrell was also the first to notice her son’s innate talent as a runner, although he primarily channeled that speed onto the gridiron as a running back for Oak Lane Youth Association teams in his pre-high school years.  

As a child in Jamaica, Bryan-Burrell had been a promising runner herself, shining on the track before departing to the United States in search of a better future. When she noticed the same aptitude for sprinting in Kristian, she gradually nudged him to take the sport more seriously. 

Although he continued to star in football at Imhotep, he also carved out an identity as one of the fastest kids in the Philadelphia area. 

Ade Jones-Roundtree, a year ahead of Marche at Imhotep and a rising star in his own right, noticed how his teammate’s affinity for track gradually grew. 

“He kind of found a home there, he started to fall in love with it.” 

As a sophomore in 2016, Marche anchored Imhotep's AA state title-winning 4x100 relay and claimed a bronze in the 100-meter dash. Junior year, he was part of Imhotep’s nationally ranked 4x200 relay that dropped a US#1 in January, before finishing the indoor season ranked third in the country. 

During his senior campaign, he won the 60-meter dash at Boston’s New Balance Indoor Grand Prix with a personal best of 6.85 seconds, then wrapped up his high school career with a fourth-place finish in the 100 at the AAA state meet. 

But if Marche had grown to love the sport, if he loved the chance to measure his wheels against teammates, state competitors, and anyone else who stepped to the track, he also loved the laughter. The lightness. The chance to crack a joke or pull a prank. 

“He was definitely the life of the party,” Jones-Roundtree says. “Everywhere we went, he was the person that, if anybody was down, he’d bring you right back up.” 

“He was goofy,” Tyrone Phillips agrees, “but he was on honor roll, too. He was educated and smart and got his work done.” 

And that was the other thing about Marche, he could flip the switch. 

Crack a joke and still nail the next repeat. 

Be the life of the party and the guy who aced the test.  

That was Kristian. 

Whether at track practice after school or during his countless hours at the Focused Athletics program, he managed to strike that balance. 

Duncan, the founder of Focused Athletics, recalls the impact that Marche’s work ethic had on the other students enrolled in the program. 

“Kristian was the real change in the culture,” Duncan says, “because he had gotten the highest SAT score for his graduating class from Focus Athletics. Instead of guys thinking that studying was dorky or whatever, they were competing in academics, too.” 

Of course, Kristian being Kristian, he talked trash about his 1080 score, trying to get the other guys around him motivated. 

When he said that his career goal was to become a dentist, those same guys — at Focused Athletics and on the Imhotep track team — gave him a predictably hard time about it. But in this case, Marche wasn’t joking. 

Even Lowery wasn’t convinced at first. 

“We were like — What do you mean, a dentist?” Lowery recalls. “A lot of times, he wasn’t really serious, he was always joking around, but he was also really, really smart.” 

At home, Marche would spend hours watching Animal Planet, then amuse his teammates and coaches with obscure facts from the natural world. 

“We were like, ‘Dude, where is this coming from?’” Lowery recalls. “No teenager talks about how excited they are about a sea turtle, or whatever he was talking about that day.” 

Phillips still laughs about the fact-checking he and others would carry out after practice. 

“He’d come with this stuff, like, ‘You know, if you get bit by a saltwater…whatever,’ and we wouldn’t believe him because he was always goofing around. Then we’d go Google it, and it would be like, ‘Ay, he was really right.’ He did know his animal facts for sure.” 

If Marche had the team in stitches with his scientific trivia, he also consistently brought the heat during sprint workouts with a group of fiercely competitive near-equals.  

“When it was time to compete with each other at practice,” Phillips says, “we took it serious. We pushed each other all the time.” 

At a school with no track of its own, much of that competition — especially during the frigid Philly winters — took place in the Imhotep hallways after students had cleared out for the day. The closeness of those hallway walls, the tightness of the sudden corners, the constant drive to reshuffle a pecking order predicated on speed, only added to the intensity. 

They put in the work, then reaped the results. 

A major highlight came in January 2017, Marche’s junior year, when an Imhotep squad traveled up to The Armory in New York City and recorded the fastest 4x200-meter relay time in the nation.

“When we got the US#1, we were shocked,” Jones-Roundtree remembers, “but we also knew how hard we had worked for it. We knew how many hours we put in those hallways, how much time we’d spent together.” 

Fast times weren’t the only outcome from those intrasquad throwdowns; the hallway battles also forged the sort of bond that can only be described as a brotherhood. 

“They were as close as brothers can be that didn’t have the same parent,” their former coach, Lowery, says now. 

It meant they hung out at each other’s houses, went to the same parties, sat together at lunch. Ate Chick-fil-A after every track meet. Rapped along on road trips to a soundtrack featuring Kur and Lil Baby and Meek Mill

It meant, after a while, that they understood each other inherently, had their own way of speaking. Could communicate on inflection and intonation alone, paring their vocabulary down to a few expressive words. 

Chop up the syllables or draw them out. 

Chill — used a hundred different ways. A verb, a noun. An adjective.

A mood. 

Sometimes they didn’t need to say anything at all; other times they couldn’t stop talking.  

They might stay up all night, laughing and making rap videos. 

Not close like brothers. Actual brothers. 

“I would see him at 8 o’clock in the morning,” Jones-Roundtree says, “and I might not leave him until 9 o’clock at night. We were brothers for sure.” 

At least part of that closeness arose from Marche’s gift for making each person feel somehow connected to his orbit. An ability to create the sense that you were illuminated in his specific light, even as others felt that, too. 

Because it wasn’t just his teammates on the track team. 

His coach, Lowery, says the two grew close enough that Marche started to feel like a younger brother to him. 

The same was true at Focused Athletics — Marche had brothers there, too. Duncan’s son, Zymir, saw Kristian as a brother. Sometimes Marche crashed on their couch all weekend, just another kid in a crowded house. 

And Thelma Davies, a recent Girard College graduate and LSU signee, who is among the best prep sprinters ever from Pennsylvania, she grew close with Kristian as well. 

When Lowery departed Imhotep for a position at Cheltenham High in the summer of 2017, Marche began working out with Davies’ coach at Girard, Diamond Woolford

It meant Davies and Marche hung out quite a bit — two Philly sprint stars, training and traveling to meets throughout Marche’s senior year.    

“He was someone I went to practice with, laughed with, took road trips with,” Davies says. “We did a lot together. I still talk to his mom all the time. I tell her, I run for her now, because he can’t. It’s like, I’m her daughter…and Kristian? That was my brother.” 

 

 

flex

 

"Kristian clearly was an exceptionally talented young man with a very promising future that was violently cut short."

- Lt. Norman Davenport, Philadelphia Police Department



For the police officers responding that night, the call was grimly familiar. 

Reports of gunfire, 9:35 p.m., Monday, August 13, 2018.  

West Oak Lane neighborhood. 

Sirens on, patrol cars raced to a summer-night shooting in the City of Brotherly Love. 

En route, the officers received an update that a victim had been found in the 1800 block of East Pastorious Street. When they arrived, they discovered an 18-year old — later identified as Marche — suffering a single gunshot wound to the head. 

As the victim was rushed to the hospital, investigators were already wringing their hands at another vexing — and equally familiar — challenge in a city struggling to contain an epidemic of gun violence: a dearth of evidence and an apparent lack of witnesses. 

Over the next 48 hours, the story received more attention than most shootings in the city because Marche had graduated from Imhotep two months earlier as an honors student and two-sport star. 

On the morning after the shooting, he was scheduled to depart for Penn State University, where he’d received a partial track scholarship. 

Instead, he lay critically wounded at Albert Einstein Medical Center. 

When Lowery woke up to all those missed calls and learned where Marche had been taken, he dressed quickly, said a hurried prayer and headed for the door. 

Einstein is only two blocks from where he lives.

The former collegiate hurdler ran the entire way. 

“When I got there,” Lowery says, “I remember seeing his family, and everyone was crying, which in turn made me cry. My legs felt like Jell-O, I couldn’t really stand up anymore, so I had to sit down.” 

It was still early, just after dawn Tuesday. 

Information about Marche’s whereabouts had been kept private, but the track coach wasn’t the only non-family member holding vigil. 

Phillips and Jones-Roundtree were already there when he arrived. 

They’d rushed to the hospital as soon as they discovered that’s where their friend was being treated. They had needed to be somewhere, sitting among people who knew him. Closer to Kristian. 

“I still didn’t believe it,” Phillips says. “We wanted to hear it from his family. His mom or somebody.” 

The sight of Iona Bryan-Burrell, inconsolable in a cluster of relatives, was all the confirmation they needed. 

Here was a mother who had delivered her son to the cusp of college — a scholarship to Penn State — and then saw it crumble the night before he was due to leave. 

In the fraught waiting room, the unassailable cruelty of that truth gnawed at Phillips. 

“He was packed up,” he says. “I just kept thinking about that.” 

In the coming hours, as word spread about Marche’s location, about his dire condition, dozens of former teammates and classmates arrived to the hospital. Athletes from around the city. School administrators and coaches. Rival coaches. 

A roomful of people holding somber vigil for news that came at 6:20 p.m. that evening: Kristian Marche had died from his injuries.  

A week later, Philadelphia police announced the arrest of two suspects, 16-year-old Taron Small and 15-year-old Byron Vinson, both from the same West Oak Lane neighborhood as Marche. 

Detectives believed the pair had been attempting to break into Marche’s home when Marche heard a noise in the back of the house and went to investigate. He saw at least one of the teens leaping from a second-level balcony and confronted both boys in the alley behind the home. 

Video obtained from a neighbor showed Marche walking through a back driveway, positioned between the two suspects: Vinson alongside him, Small a few steps behind. At that point, police said, Small pulled a gun and shot Marche once in the head. 

“This was not a struggle,” Lieutenant Norman Davenport declared at a press conference announcing the arrests. “This was not a fight. This was a clear case of murder.” 

If there was anything immediately remarkable about the two boys arrested — anything that startled in a community that has become increasingly inured to the cycle of violence — it was their obvious youth.   

“For them to be that young,” Phillips says, “yeah, it was shocking. But I don’t ever remember hearing about them, or really know them.” 

Jones-Roundtree was equally baffled by the seeming randomness of the shooting. 

“I don’t know a lot about the situation,” he says. “It just caught me off guard — period. Growing up here my entire life, there’s a lot of things that wouldn’t happen normally, or shouldn’t happen normally, that happen.”

 

team

 

“We will never know his impact…would he have been a leader for our group? We never had the opportunity to find out.”

- Erin Tucker, associate head coach, Penn State Track & Field 



When Kristian Marche was killed, his absence left holes and hollows everywhere. 

People waiting for him, places he should have been. 

A bedroom in a house on East Pastorious Street with bags packed for college. A dorm room in State College where he never slept. 

An intended roommate, British triple jumper Wesley Matsuka-Williams, he never had a chance to meet.  

Seats in classrooms he never occupied. 

Gaps that can only be filled with memory and speculation. 

Erin Tucker, the Penn State sprints coach who recruited Marche, remembers the Imhotep senior as an inquisitive student who used his campus visit to pepper the coach for details about college academics and the Nittany Lions’ team. 

“He was a kid that asked a lot of good questions,” Tucker says. “Questions that many kids sometimes fail to ask.” 

Tucker had initially been recruiting Thelma Davies when Davies’ coach, Woolford, turned him on to another talented speedster he was mentoring. 

A Penn State graduate himself, Woolford emphasized a trait that Tucker is always seeking in the student-athletes he recruits. 

“The one thing Diamond said, repeatedly, was that (Kristian) challenged everybody he was around.” 

Tucker brought Marche and his mom to State College for a visit in late spring, 2018. The semester had already ended at Penn State, campus was lightly populated, but Will Henderson, a rising sophomore at the time, remained behind to train for the USATF Junior National meet. 

Henderson hosted Marche during the trip. 

“Kristian definitely had his head on his shoulders,” he says now. 

Henderson grew up in Baltimore, 100 miles down I-95 from Philadelphia, but he knows several Imhotep graduates attending Penn State and quickly realized he and Marche had a lot in common. 

When Kristian informed him at the end of the visit that he was sold on the university and planned to commit, Henderson looked forward to welcoming him to the team. They stayed in touch over the summer, exchanged text messages and discussed future plans. 

Even though they’d only spent a single day together, Henderson felt like he got Kristian. That he understood his new friend’s circumstances, his background, his motivation. The toll that being different must have taken on him. 

“When you’re different in the city, you stand out,” Henderson says. “Because you have a chance to make a different path for yourself.” 

In Henderson’s experience, that can cut two ways: People either think you’re trying to be better than everyone else, and seek to pull you down, or you become the pride of the neighborhood, and the streets pull for you

Sometimes, it cuts both ways at once. 

Jealousy and pride, resentment and love. 

“I’ve experienced both,” Henderson says, “and I know Kristian experienced both. As soon as we got some one-on-one time on the visit, and we started talking to ways we’d be if he was back in Philly or I was back in Baltimore, then I knew he had seen both sides. And he had that balance. He had that gritty, that ‘hood side to him, but he also had his head on his shoulders. It’s okay to have both sides — to me, that’s what it takes to make it out. 

“Unfortunately, he ran into those two boys and still didn’t make it.” 

When news of Marche’s murder reached Penn State, most students had yet to return to campus. Sandy Barbour, the university’s director of athletics, released a statement to the media, and John Gondak, head track and field coach for the Nittany Lions, sent an email to the team. 

As the only member of the track team who’d spent significant time with Marche and his mother on the visit, Henderson was asked to represent Penn State at Kristian’s memorial service in Philadelphia. 

He didn’t realize until he arrived at True United Church on the morning of the ceremony that he’d be expected to say a few words. 

“Coach Tuck didn’t even know I was going up there,” Henderson recalls. “It was a thing that I felt, as a leader on the team, I had to do.” 

Drawing inspiration from his grandfather, an ordained minister, he groped for the appropriate words to console a grieving family. Floored by the loss Marche’s mom and younger brother, Xavier, must have been absorbing, he removed a bracelet he’d worn to the ceremony — a Penn State wristband that said HEART OF A LION — and presented it to Kristian’s mother. 

“She’s a strong woman,” says Henderson, who has stayed in touch with the family. “She told me she still wears the wristband to this day. Whenever I speak to her, it’s always in a respectful manner. Always a careful thing. I don’t know what she’s going through, all I know is that her son is gone.” 

Coach Tucker maintains a similar connection — and a similar reverence — for the mother of a boy he never had the chance to mentor. 

He remembers speaking with Bryan-Burrell a week before Marche was due to arrive on campus, how a loving, protective mother chided him about entrusting her son to a man 200 miles away. 

“Alright Coach Tucker,” he recalls her saying, “I’m sending you my baby…” 

Tucker, who grew up in rough New York neighborhoods in the 1990s, understood where Marche’s mom was coming from. In nearly two decades of coaching, he’d been on the receiving end of this conversation before. It would have been surprising if Bryan-Burrell hadn’t given him a hard time about caring for the young man she’d raised to the edge of adulthood. 

“Once he gets up here,” Tucker assured her. “He’s going to be in great hands.” 

Two weeks after Kristian’s funeral, on a phone call with Bryan-Burrell, the veteran coach was caught off guard when Marche’s mom apologized for the good-natured admonition she’d given him.  

He gently told her he understood. He has three children of his own. 

He gets it. 

Which may be why, a moment later, his voice catches: 

“She said to me, ‘I just couldn’t get him to you…’”

 

 

tributes

 

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t step on the track and think about him.”

- Jerome Lowery, Cheltenham H.S. girls coach (former Imhotep coach)

 

A year after his death, those who love Kristian still carry him everywhere. 

Phillips has a photo of Marche set as the lock screen on his phone. He keeps references to his friend on his Instagram and Twitter profiles. 

“Every day I see his name,” he says, “I see his face.” 

Jones-Roundtree has similar mementos. 

“I keep a picture on me,” he says. “I keep a T-shirt on me. I have plenty of physical things to keep him alive, but I feel like the biggest thing is keeping him alive in spirit and never forgetting about him.” 

Davies, who won the New Balance Nationals Outdoor 200-meter title this summer, and then took gold (4x100) and silver (100) at the Pan American U-20 Championships, thinks about Marche before and after every race. 

“It hurts not seeing his texts,” she acknowledges, “to say Congrats, or Proud of you sis, but all my accomplishments, all the victories, those are for him.”

 

 

Last fall, the Imhotep football team wore jersey patches that read “11 Strong,” a reference to Marche’s number when he played. 

Inside the charter school, a Philadelphia street artist named Amberella painted a large heart mural, emblazoned with the words “You Are Loved,” in Marche’s memory. 

During the indoor season, Penn State’s track team wore custom-made MARCHE ON shirts for the Big Ten championship meet.  

After the meet, Tucker sent the shirts to Marche’s mom and his younger brother, ensuring that both knew Kristian remained in their hearts. 

“We felt like he was part of our team all year,” Tucker says. “We talked about him all the time.” 

At the Focused Athletics program, a $500 scholarship was created in Marche’s honor. Fittingly, it’s meant to be awarded annually to a two-sport star who receives that year’s highest score on the SAT.  

In late spring, the inaugural Marche Scholarship was awarded to Motivation High sprinter and football standout Nasir Savage. 

“We’ve tried,” Duncan says, “to make as much out of this tragedy as we could.” 

Another Marche memorial hit even closer to home for Duncan. 

On the day Kristian died, his son Zymir asked for $300. After being assured the money was for a tattoo, Duncan gave the money to his grieving son. 

“He came home and he’d gotten Kristian’s entire face tattooed on his back.”

A year later, and the memories and reminders are still everywhere. 

But if the people who love Kristian are carrying remembrances — physical and emotional — of their fallen friend, they also carry the fear from that day. The ways in which his story suggests their own vulnerability, their own fragility. 

They carry the heightened vigilance that comes from seeing a young man like Marche cut down in the city where they live. 

“You see this kid,” Lowery says, pointedly, “and everybody had seen him compete at the Penn Relays, he was US#1 in the country with his team, so you would assume that if you kept him in programs that the city runs, and you kept him in school, and he was always in track or football so he always had something to do, and didn’t get involved in the ugliness that can exist in the city, and still — it seems like it wasn’t enough. That’s really hard to accept.” 

Any hope that Marche’s death, as prominently-covered as it was, might have served as a reality check, or slowed the pace of violence in Philadelphia over the last 12 months, has been trampled by the daunting persistence of shootings in the city. 

According to police crime statistics, the city saw 353 homicides in 2018, the year Marche was murdered. 

This year, despite a host of grassroots efforts aimed at stemming the violence, many organized by young men impacted by shootings in their own neighborhoods, those numbers have continued apace, with 200 homicides through August 11, up 4 percent from the same period a year ago. 

On the weekend before the one-year anniversary of Marche’s killing, 12 people were shot in incidents that touched every corner of the city.   

“It’s not one problem that’s an easy fix,” Jones-Roundtree says, showing wisdom that belies his age. “These are generational issues, these are communal issues. It’s going to take a while…it’s so complicated, it’s so deeply rooted.” 

For young people like Jones-Roundtree and Phillips, home from college for the summer, or Davies, soon to depart for LSU, it means moving through their days with a wariness many college peers never experience. 

“Right now,” Davies says, “with all the shootings that’s happening, my coach is like, ‘Stay in the house. Don’t go out too late, or make sure you stay safe and text me when you get home.’” 

As she steers clear of parties, follows Woolford’s advice and keeps a low profile, she can’t help thinking about Kristian. How close he came to leaving. The bags that were already packed.

The senselessness of it all. 

Lowery, the former Imhotep coach, thinks about that, too. 

“The way the story unfolded,” he says, “to find out how it happened…it made no sense at all.” 

The case against Vinson and Small is still moving through the judicial process. Both teens waived their rights to preliminary hearings in the spring. Questions remain about the motive and the nature of Marche’s relationship to the young men who killed him. 

A trial looms at some point in the future. 

“We’re still waiting to hear more about the story,” says Lowery, who remains close with Marche’s mom and brother. “You never really get to the full story until the trial, but it’s been so long, waiting for that to happen.” 

In the absence of that full narrative, those who love him cling to other stories. 

Not the easy, facile stories that the media seized upon in the immediate aftermath — track star and senseless tragedy — but the quieter, more intimate stories. Everything that lives between those edges, the things that really stick to memory. 

The sidelong smirk when coach says something crazy, or the arm draped around a shoulder after a tough loss. 

Fragments and caught moments. 

The freestyle raps that cracked up a vanful of relay teammates. The Animal Planet facts, and the breathless, heaving breaks between hallway sprints. The quick joke and the smile full of braces. The glance between friends — between brothers — when words aren’t even necessary. The summer nights before you leave for college, when the windows are open and the air is finally cool, and everything still feels possible. 

The people who love Kristian cling to those stories, because those stories have the power to gather their friend back. Because in those stories, the summer nights still thrum with promise and the hallways still echo with Kristian’s laughter, his intensity, his ridiculous potential. 

In those stories, all the missing becomes momentarily bearable, because in those stories, Kristian is still here.

 Not just another truncated Philadelphia life. 

Another young man, interrupted by gunfire. 

But a kid who was here

A kid who laughed and loved and was always — always — the life of the party. 

“He’s still missed,” Davies says, dabbing back tears. “He’s still loved, and he’s still thought about — all the time.”



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1 comment(s)
RunMom71
What a tragic bittersweet story of a life lost way too young. I appreciate the writer going in depth about the impact Kristen had on his community and how his senseless death left. dreams unfulfilled. It saddens me to read how such a promising young man could be cut down in an instant. This is a story I will remember. As a mom of a black boy, I carry a certain amount of fear, even when I'm doing everything I am able to keep my son safe. I see myself in Kristen's mom, which frightens me. I pray we can uplift one another and teach our young people to choose life. Peace Be Upon Kristen and His Family.
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