TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
“Davon Thomas McNeal #3,”
the stone read. “Baby Day Day.”
Kevin stood beside the grass
that sprouted atop the burial site.
“It’s been a whole year, man,”
Kevin said to his player under-
ground. “It seems like yesterday
we was all practicing.”
Kevin had last seen Davon
three days before he died, when
he had given the 11-year-old a ride
home from practice with Zay.
Davon sat in the front seat.
A year later, dark bags hung
beneath Kevin’s eyes and two pins
with Davon’s face adorned his
chest.
He shuffled around the grass in
his Crocs, with Zay a couple feet to
his left. No one spoke. The “03”
balloons blew in the wind.
“I lost a lot of my friends when I
grew up,” Kevin said. “But I didn’t
start to lose them until I was 16.”
He wiped his eyes and contin-
ued: “I know I’m on y’all. I’m
going to stay on y’all because you
aren’t going to be on the other
side of this.”
Zay squatted next to Kevin and
buried his head into his knees.
Kevin stood up, walked toward
the Black Knight and wrote “LL
Black Knight” — Long Live 3 — in
chalk on the sidewalk. One of his
players wrote behind him, “For-
ever 3.”
“Next time I come here, I’m
going to write a whole paragraph
in chalk,” Zay mumbled.
Kevin quietly made his way
back over to the grave. He crum-
pled to the ground.
Six minutes passed with his
players quietly looking on before
he rose and wiped his tears.
“You guys grab each other,”
Kevin said.
They stood in a team huddle,
similar to how they have gathered
at practices, at games, and at the
funeral of their slain teammate.
“Let them hear Davon’s voice,
oh God, when they are ready to
give up, when they are ready to do
something negative,” Kevin
prayed. “I am asking that we will
never have to experience a loss
like this again.”
They turned around together
and walked toward the Black
Knight.
[email protected]the basketball court and, after-
ward, beg one of their moms to
please order pizza. They used to
argue about who had more girls,
even though neither had come
close to kissing one.
Then Davon was killed and
another one of his classmates
died of an illness. And over the
last year, while Zay was mourning
the death of his friends and living
with the daily sight of his father
on a hospital bed near the kitch-
en, three of his uncles were fatally
shot.
Zay was starting to think that it
was only a matter of time until he,
too, would feel a bullet tear
through his skin. He had tried to
ignore those fears by turning to
Netflix, video games and the bas-
ketball hoop that hung on his
bedroom door. But sleep trans-
formed into vivid nightmares
about stray bullets swirling
around him.
He started to run away from
cars with tinted windows.
“I was always playful, but I’m
not like that no more,” Zay said. “I
probably got like that when peo-
ple started dying in my family.”
Zay was mourning more than
his loved ones. He grieved for his
own future, too. And Kevin knew
that. The coach had made sure to
spend extra time with Zay, giving
him rides almost daily, calling
him to make sure he was awake in
time for virtual school, and invit-
ing him into his apartment for a
week in April.
“There are a few of y’all I’m
expecting to grow up this year,”
Kevin had said at the end of
practice that day in April, looking
at Zay. “Don’t let me down. Don’t
let yourselves down.”
Zay nodded.
‘The other side of this’
A year after the Metro Bengals
buried one of their own, the boys,
who now played for the Ridge
Road Titans, followed their coach
across a field, as they always do.
This time, the grass was decorat-
ed not with goal lines but with
headstones.
They stopped at a g rave sur-
rounded by teddy bears, fresh
flowers, and balloons shaped like
footballs and the number 3.
PHOTOS BY TONI L. SANDYS/THE WASHINGTON POST
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Kevin, left, le aves messages in chalk on the driveway of the cemetery. S ome of his players joined him for
a recent visit to Davon’s burial site. They have been coping with the loss of one of their own. A h and-painted rock placed on Davon’s
memorial bench. Kevin grieves at Davon’s burial site, which he visits regularly. “I’m going to stay on y’all because you aren’t going to
be on the other side of this,” he said to the players at the cemetery.