Harding to honor fallen player on Senior Night

There has been an empty chair between the Harding bench and the scorer’s table at each home game this basketball season. Although his assistants know the deeper story, coach LaMar Kennedy said he will talk to his players about it before the season’s home finale on Friday.

The chair is for Angel Santiago.

It is a chair that remains empty.

“Angel would have been a senior this year,” Kennedy said. “We were very high on him after his freshman year. We thought he was our point guard of the future.

“He would have been part of my first senior class here. I wanted to honor his memory this season. I hadn’t even told the team why we are doing it.”

Friday against Bridgeport Central is Senior Night. It is the perfect time to tell his guys about the empty chair.

“The thought process,” Kenney said, “was to keep Angel’s memory alive and give him the best seat in the house. We miss Angel.

We wish he was still with us.”

There always is danger in our cities, of course, and Santiago found it late one June night in 2020 in an unusual place in East Bridgeport. He was playing around with a friend on a train car. According to officials, it was among a line of 10 cargo train cars carrying crushed stone used as ballast to anchor rails to the ground. The train, by Crescent Ave., was stationary.

According to officials, Santiago was standing atop the train car when he came into contact with a live catenary/transmission line that powers Metro-North trains and has 13,000 volts of electricity.

Burned head to foot, he battled to stay alive for eight days. Angel Santiago was 16.

There was an outdoor basketball tournament held in his honor upon the second anniversary of his death last June. COVID-19 had placed restrictions on gatherings, and this was a chance to celebrate his life. A park bench was dedicated in his honor.

His family continued to push for caution signs and larger safety measures in the area.

Kennedy said he was telling people that he lived in Bridgeport 45 years, back when that area was more densely populated, and it was the first time he had heard something like