Just over 4 ½ years ago her son — Kordero Hunter, a starting cornerback for the Marauders — was shot and killed outside the since-closed A-List Lounge on South Ludlow Street in Dayton. That party also had been put on by an outside promoter who over-packed the place with CSU students — some brought by bus — from the campus 25 miles away.
Kordero was an innocent bystander, killed by 30-year-old Jason Shern, a disgruntled Dayton guy with a long arrest record who felt slighted by some of the football players and opened fire on the crowd after he had been kicked out.
Grooms and Ray fared better than Kordero. They survived their ordeal.
But the incident had more than a few similarities to Kodero’s shooting in September 2011.
And that got me thinking about Kim Hunter and her former husband Kevin, especially as I tried to understand a series of other senseless, high-profile shootings that have occurred in recent weeks, both in their city and in the sports world.
Chicago, long plagued by violence, has seen a tragic rise in shootings and homicides this year. As of early Friday, 163 people have been murdered in the city this year, more than an 80-percent rise over the same period last year.
A week ago city statistics showed 605 people had been shot there, double the number of a year ago.
The senselessness was never more evident than in the murder of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee, a fourth-grader lured from the South Side playground where he was shooting baskets and shot to death execution style in a nearby alley.
The murder was said to involve gangs and two weeks ago Tyshawn’s dad was charged when three people were shot in retaliation.
Then just last Saturday in New Orleans, former Ohio State and New Orleans Saints standout Will Smith was shot eight times — seven in the back — following a fender bender in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans. Smith’s wife Racquel, the mother of his three young children, was shot twice.
She survived. Smith died at the scene.
Cardell Hayes, a guy who has been in trouble before, was charged with second-degree murder.
NFL running back Pierre Thomas — who is from the South Side of Chicago and had played football against the Hunters’ older son, Kevin, in the Illinois state high school playoffs — had dined with Smith just before the shooting and arrived at the scene moments after it happened.
He later poured out his anguish on Facebook:
“I witnessed a close friend, teammate and a man that I thought of as one of my big brothers in the NFL shot dead over a (expletive) FENDER BENDER!!! What, why how? I just don’t get it. These images I have in my head will never leave me….
“People!!! When is the (expletive) going to stop? There is so much senseless killing going on in the world and I’m not saying I have the answer to fix it…but I am willing to do my part to help and find a solution.”
And that’s why I called Kim Hunter the other day.
She and Kevin Sr. had those same questions after Kordero’s murder in Dayton.
They struggled and somehow have managed to forge ahead, each full-heartedly honoring their son, but coping differently.
Hoping to find a solution, Kim launched an effort called the Kordero Hunter MVP Foundation. The initials stand for Man’s Valuable Purpose and the concept draws on the biblical passage Proverbs 22:6:
“Train up a child in the way he should go.”
In the process she has sought to find the value in the young men who — when she first comes upon them — seem to have more in common with guys like Jason Shern and Cardell Hayes than her own son.
“My child was stolen from me at a time when he was most promising,” she once explained to me. “I won’t get the phone calls I used to get from him on Sundays. Won’t see his smile. Won’t see him graduate. I won’t get a chance to see what kind of a man he could have been.
“I don’t want another parent to experience what I am so I figure if someone could teach young men some healthier coping, that’s a start.”
As she further explained the other day: “My mission is to focus on young males at risk and make sure we get them on the right path. My hope is to equip urban young men from 12 to 20 to get a better education, employment, a better life and to help make a better society.
“I still believe if someone had stepped into Jason Shern’s life and guided him the right way, that night probably wouldn’t have happened as it did.”
‘Showed no remorse’
Kordero’s parents are college-educated — they met at Illinois State University — and ended up in productive jobs.
Kevin has been a credit analyst at a Chicago-area bank and Kim is a high school guidance counselor on Chicago’s South Side.
Their eldest son, Kevin Jr., educated at Northern Illinois University, has a master’s degree, a wife and a young child.
Kordero was trying to follow suit. Although there were a couple of minor hiccups along the way, he was a high school football star, played a year at Northern Illinois and eventually transferred to Central State, where, in the early fall of 2011, he finally was making his mark.
Thirteen days before his death he had played well for the Marauders in their game against North Carolina Central in the Cleveland Classic at FirstEnergy Stadium, home of the Browns.
Dayton pastor Dion Sampson, who also ministered CSU students, said Kordero had been coming to his weekly bible study sessions on campus and would come to his home on Sundays for dinner with his family.
“Kordero was aspiring to be a professional counselor like me,” Kim said. “He wanted to use his talents as an athlete to do that. He said to me, ‘Mom, you’re going to have to help me help other young men. You don’t know how it is out here and what some guys are up against.’ ”
Shern was someone who needed just such help, said Pastor Sampson, who, ironically, had known him since he was a young teen. By the time he randomly killed Kordero — who had simply walked out of the club and was shot in the abdomen — Shern was regularly in trouble with the law.
In the courtroom — before Shern accepted the plea deal of second-degree murder and a prison sentence of 15 years to life — his family showed little empathy to the Hunter family. One of his sisters was thrown out of the courtroom for her comments to them.
Outside, Shern’s family became agitated as they complained about how unfairly they thought he had been characterized.
“That was the really sad part,” Kim said. “That really got to me the way they treated us. It hurt that his mother was not able to connect with me as a mother and the pain I felt in losing a child. That spoke to me on her parenting of Jason.”
Although she said Shern “showed no remorse,” Kim said she has forgiven him. While she said that’s not the case for her former husband and their older son, she said it was the only way she could move on in life:
“I had to forgive Jason to be able to do the work I do now because I see some guys who remind me so much of him and his mindset … I reached out to Pastor Sampson and at one point I even wanted to talk to Jason.
“Even now I wonder how he is in prison. Has he changed? I don’t know why, but I’d like to know that.”
Foundation expands
Kevin has coped differently than Kim.
At first he struggled mightily with the loss of his son and he has not been able to involve himself in the MVP Foundation.
“I’m doing much better now and year by year I get stronger,” he said the other day. “The first couple of years were really tough. I spent a lot of time with a counselor trying to get myself back together. As time moves on, you never get over it, but you have to heal and keep living.
“I still go out to the cemetery and do a lot of cleanup work. I’m there on certain holidays and I celebrate my son’s birthday. I’m just thankful I got back on my feet and am moving ahead.
“Another guy I know, the same thing happened to him. His son actually went to school with Kordero at Northern. His boy was at a party and a guy just back from Iraq who was going through post-war stuff opened fire without hesitation. The boy was killed and his father never really recovered. He lost his job and his marriage.”
Kim hurt just as much as Kevin, but she reacted differently. Ironically, Will Smith took a similar path to hers back home in Utica, N.Y. That’s where he and his wife had launched “Where There’s A Will, There’s A Way,” a program that deals with at-risk kids.
“I wanted to teach to young men who a lot of other people write off as a handful or a waste,” Kim told me once before. “Some are kids who come from broken homes or have gang affiliations or have had issues with aggressive behavior at school. Some of them potentially could end up harming another child, so I wanted to see that they have alternatives and are introduced to more of what the world has to offer.”
Her foundation offers training in all kinds of areas — jobs, health, dealing with domestic violence — and pushes constructive involvements, everything from voter registration to coat give-aways. There are associations with well-known people from the community and fun outings that often include sports events.
The Foundation has expanded recently and is involved with various schools and churches, most notably South Side Pastor Corey Brooks and his New Beginnings Church. He has a contract with the juvenile justice system and has incorporated her MVP Training for those youth, too.
To date Kim said 44 young men have come through the MVP Foundation. Her intent is to take on kids seen as trouble-makers and return them to their environment as positive role models.
Even though her foundation is run on donations and can use help (to find out more go to korderosdream.org), she has handed out college scholarships.
She said 10 of the MVP young men are in college and four — one at Valparaiso, one at Howard and two at Southern University — are about to graduate. A couple have told her they want to return to Chicago and help her with the foundation.
And that’s what keeps her from wilting when she hears the ever-numbing statistics for violence in Chicago and of the murder of Will Smith in New Orleans and the shooting of two more Central State players in the Dayton area.
“I feel overwhelmed and then some young man — almost like God is sending him to me — will come and say what the MVP training meant or did for him,” she said quietly.
“He tells me how it changed his life and I know it’s because of Kordero that that happened. And that continues to show me that my son mattered and that he’s still contributing to the world.
“In that way my son — his name, what he was about — stays alive.”
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