After his son’s AAU basketball competition, Christopher Cherry made his way back to his Knoxville home.
Ten-year-old Shane was happy after a great vacation. His father was filled with dread as he prepared to deliver terrible news.
“My dad didn’t tell me at first,” admitted Shane, a student at Austin-East today. “He told me after about two days. When I learned, I started bawling.
In April 2016, Shane found out that his 12-year-old best buddy, Jajuan Latham, had been shot and died while in the car with his dad, who had escaped. After a celebrity basketball game with a focus on preventing gun violence, the two had gone.
This was not the first time Christopher relayed tragic news to his son. Two years earlier in 2014, Shane’s 7-year-old sister Seraya “Bubbles” Glasper was one of three victims who died in a bus collision caused by a texting driver. Shane still remembers his dad weeping in the bathroom when he told him.
Instead of letting grief consume him, however, he became self-driven. Instead of giving up on playing basketball when Jajuan died, he carried his best friend’s dreams with him.
“He’s been through a lot, and a lot of this stuff would have made anybody be like, ‘I’m done with this. I quit. I just can’t do it no more,’” said Candis Mobley, Shane’s mother. “But I think it’s been his fuel.”
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