USA TODAY International Edition
3 shooting survivors play for lost friends
Ky. football players remember victims
BENTON, Ky. – Minutes before Friday night’s season opener, Tyler Stevenson stepped to the front of a crowded Marshall County High School football locker room. The senior’s booming voice reverberated off the walls and cut through the silence.
“Nobody really understands what we have gone through in the past six months,” he said. “We have three people in this locker room right now that took bullets on this campus . ... They’re standing here right now. Play for them.”
Those players — juniors Devon Evans, Dalton Keeling and Gage Smock — were scattered in the locker room and didn’t flinch despite the reminder of what they went through on Jan. 23.
They were in the commons area when gunfire erupted before the morning bell. By the time it was over, they were among the 14 students who were injured. Their friends, Bailey Holt and Preston Cope, had been killed. Another student, Gabe Parker, was arrested.
In the locker room, Stevenson continued. “If you don’t play for Preston and Bailey tonight, then you ain’t playing for nothing. We have spilled blood, sweat and tears on this freaking campus. And it is time you take it to somebody else.”
The Marshals jumped out of their seats and hurried out of the suddenly raucous locker room and under a doorway to the exit that featured the sign, “MC Pride.” The players circled around their captains underneath the southend goalpost and broke the huddle with “Marshall Strong.” In front of thousands of friends, family and classmates, they headed out of an inflatable tunnel and onto the field.
Keeling remembers the sound of the gunshots, but then his memory gets fuzzy. He knows he was standing in a crowd with Evans, Smock, Cope and Holt. The next thing he remembers was just trying to make it to an exit.
“I just kind of froze,” said Keeling, now 17. “I couldn’t really do anything. I was like, ‘Is this real?’ ”
As he was running, he noticed he was out of breath. He lifted up his shirt and found he had been shot through the chest. The bullet exited through his back and shattered his ribs. He was rushed to a hospital and stayed for three days. There, Keeling was overcome with emotion. “Just seeing somebody do that to us when we didn’t do nothing to him, there’s a lot of anger,” he said Friday.
He returned to school about two weeks later. He said it helped with the healing process but it hasn’t helped the recurring memories of the shooting. “It’s something that is burnt into my brain. You got to learn how to grow and overcome it, but it’ll always be there.”
A bullet entered one side of Smock’s face and exited the other, shattering his jaw.
He was taken to a Nashville hospital, where his jaw was wired shut for six weeks. Confined to a liquid diet, he lost 30 pounds. He stayed home from school the remainder of the semester while he recovered emotionally and physically.
Cope was a good friend and baseball teammate, but Holt was his girlfriend. They had been dating for eight months. His favorite memories with her were hanging out after school and watching old movies, such as “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ” and the “National Lampoon” series. He loved her sense of humor. “I miss her a lot,” said Smock, 16. “That’s what’s really has bothered me the most.”
He said the shooting made him grow up faster than he needed to.
“You appreciate more things in life and you notice more things that you didn’t notice before, like things you took for granted before. Like just being able to drive, being able to see, being able to be with family.”
The bullet that struck Evans exited his left arm. He was taken by a teacher to a classroom, where they stayed until authorities cleared the commons. As he left the school, they told him to his close eyes. He didn’t listen. “I saw everything that was out there,” said Evans, 16.
The doctors told him he wouldn’t regain feeling in his arm for three months. Days later, he was in the weight room working out with the football team. And he was back at school the first chance.
“You’ve got to get on with life and show everyone that, no matter what, you can always push past it,” he said.
On Evans’ left biceps, he’s in the process of finishing a tattoo to commemorate the shooting. It features Bailey and Preston walking up the stairway to heaven. There’s a clock with the time of the shooting; it’s being shattered by his shooting scar.
“We’ve had a lot of curveballs thrown at us in life, but no matter what, you can always step up to the plate and show them what you got to go out with,” Evans said.
In the hours leading up to Friday’s game against Fort Campbell, Keeling sat in the locker room alongside a scooterbound Evans, a running back who broke his ankle during a scrimmage the previous week. He picked a purple cast for his ankle, Holt’s favorite color. When he plays in his first game, he’s going to wear Cope’s baseball number, No. 5. The doctor told him it would take up to six weeks to return, but he planned on being on the practice field Monday.
Meanwhile, Smock received welcome news Wednesday. He was cleared to play his spot on the offensive line.
The Marshals used two long touchdowns from Stevenson to take an early lead. Keeling started at right guard and played on the defensive line. When he was on the sideline, he stood next to Smock and Evans, who both didn’t get into the game. They joked around with their teammates as the Marshals held the Falcons scoreless in the second half en route to a 34-12 win.
Coach Evan Merrick addressed them and pointed out they were 1-0 for the first time since 2012.
“Set the tone,” he said. “That’s what we wanted.”