She remembers “just freaking out,” unable to breathe or speak or think, but then she managed to pack a bag and hurry off to meet Kevin and their older son, Kevin Jr., for the frantic trip from the South Side of Chicago to Dayton.
She drove, her son was in the passenger seat and Kevin Sr. was in the back. Initially, she had no luck getting information from Miami Valley Hospital and with each unfulfilled call, the panic intensified.
How could this have happened?
Just 13 days earlier, Kordero, their younger son, had had the shining moment of his college football career. After a bumpy couple of years — culminating with his transfer from Northern Illinois University — he had come to Central State, won the starting cornerback position and, though the Marauders had lost, he had played well against North Carolina Central in the Cleveland Classic at Cleveland Browns Stadium.
His mom had been in the stands that day. His dad had been at CSU’s Dayton Classic game at Welcome Stadium the week before and both parents had been reminded of Kordero’s glory days at Hillcrest High in the Chicago suburb of Country Club Hills.
More importantly, their boy had been establishing himself in the classroom and on campus.
“Kordero was in the group that came to the bible study I teach every Thursday on campus,” said Pastor Dion Sampson, a former CSU student who now ministers in Dayton. “My wife and I also have dinner for young people on Sundays and Kordero was often a guest at our house. He liked to have fun, but at the same time he was serious and he cared about his friends. He was just an awesome guy.”
Kim, a counselor at Christian Fenger High in Chicago, was seeing that, too: “As a parent you can look at your child and just know when he’s finally turned the corner and is headed in the right direction.”
Kordero – who had turned 21 earlier in the month — was feeling good about life, as well, and maybe it was that euphoria that prompted him to get into the red Dodge Charger his dad had just gotten him before school started and drive from his Xenia apartment to what was then the A-List Lounge – and now the Envy Ultra Lounge – on South Ludlow Street.
There he planned to join a crush of other Marauder students who had been bused the 25 miles from campus to the downtown Dayton club by a college promoter for what was billed as a CSU Night. In fact, almost everyone connected to the A-List — from the guy who owns the club to the DJ, bartenders and bouncers — was a CSU alum or former student.
Before leaving, Kordero called his grandmother in Chicago and also spoke to his dad, who said he told his boy to “have fun, but be careful.” Kordero told him he was going to be with his classmates.
“Those Central State kids didn’t really know what they were walking into,” said Dayton Police Major Larry Faulkner, a vocal critic of the few problematic bars in the downtown area he oversees. “And the next thing you know that poor young man gets shot.”
Kim said they had just turned onto I-65 in northern Indiana when Kevin’s phone rang: “They told him Kor hadn’t made it and he just lost it. He threw the phone and broke down and said he had to get out of the car.”
She pulled their vehicle onto the berm and her former husband and their son got out: “They just walked up and down the highway screaming. I sat there in the car and called my friend and asked her to pray with me. I needed to hold it together to get through the trip.”
Kim finally got the men back into the car and that’s when Kevin Sr. told her he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t make the trip. She turned around, drove him to his mother’s house outside Chicago and then headed out again on that inconceivable five-hour drive.
“Somehow I was able to maintain my composure the whole way,” she said. “I just kept thinking I’ve got to get to my boy. But then when I got to the hospital he was gone. He was a homicide victim and the coroner had his body.
“That’s when it all hit me. ‘I wasn’t bringing our son home. And so all I could think of was that, ‘I want to get every part of Kordero out of Ohio, now.’ ”
A Dayton police detective helped them get Kordero’s car keys and wallet. “We got directions to that club and there was Kordero’s car parked right across the street,” Kim said. “And we went to his apartment and it looked just like he’d left it – clothes all over, an unfinished pizza on the stove, his bible by his bed. We packed up everything and then I had one last thing to do.
“I had to make arrangements to have our son’s body flown home.”
Tears were rolling down her cheeks now, her voice drifted off … and she began to weep.
From a good family
Kim and Kevin met at Illinois State University and soon were married. Some five years after Kevin was born, they had Kordero. More outspoken than his older brother, he could be playful, headstrong and charming. And like Kevin, he gravitated to football.
“When he was 3, my sister bought him a Chicago Bears football outfit and he slept in in,” Kim said with a smile. “He always wanted to be a football player. He’d always say that one day he’d make it big and buy an estate for all of us. His dad would say, ‘’You’re not putting us in there together are you?’ And he’d go, ‘No, mom will stay in the west wing and Dad, you get the east.’ We’d all laugh at that.”
Kevin Sr., a longtime credit analyst at a Chicago-area bank, said he got Kordero playing football at an early age and helped guide him along each season.
“The boys were raised by a very strong African-American man, a good provider, just a positive influence in their lives,” Kim said.
As Kevin Sr. put it: “That’s what needs to come out about Kordero. He wasn’t a street kid. He came from a good family that believes in education, working, paying taxes, voting, being good citizens. He had a foundation.”
Kevin Jr. graduated from Northern Illinois and then got his master’s degree.
Kordero planned to follow his brother to NIU and after winning all-conference football honors as a senior, he had a scholarship offer. But then he and another student got involved in what Kim calls a “stupid prank” — shooting a paint ball gun at students — and they got booted from the school. Kordero transferred to nearby Eisenhower High, graduated and went on to NIU, but, as his dad said, the stunt cost him his scholarship.
He walked onto the team, struggled to find playing time, had a thorny relationship with a girlfriend and finally decided to follow a high school friend to CSU.
Once he got to Central State he found a half dozen guys on the football team from Chicago’s South Side and became especially close to linebacker Darius Wilson, whom he had played against as a youngster right up through their days at neighboring high schools.
“When Kordero first got here he talked about all the stuff he was gonna do on the field when he finally could play for us,” said head coach E. J. Junior. “I told him, ‘Actions speak louder than words,’ and I’ve got to say, he was starting to do just what he said he would.”
Kim had given her boy the same advice:
“I’ve told all the kids, when you start thinking about a career, you don’t want to do something just to make money. You want to do something where you use your gifts to help others. You have to have a purpose in life.
“And right before he passed he said, ‘Mom, I think I want to be a counselor. Something like you do. I want to work with young men and help them stay out of trouble.”
‘I’m hit’
Demetrius Wright was right next to Kordero — “an arm’s length away,” he said — when trouble found him last September.
The 35-year-old Wright owns the building on Ludlow that housed the A List — and now its reincarnation as the Envy Ultra Lounge — and he runs the club.
Although the place was closed a few nights ago — it only opens late on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights — he was there in the empty club, leaning on the big, square bar that’s the centerpiece of the exposed brick room. Soon he found himself surrounded by the images of that deadly night one year past.
“I had pulled up late because I was coming from the restaurant I used to have in Cincinnati,” he said. “I wasn’t here 20 minutes when an altercation broke out between some locals and some football players. There was a lot of pushing and shoving, some guys started to fight and security got on it very fast. I pushed some of the players out the door and I told them to leave and they did.
A local guy who had gotten involved in the dispute — lanky, 6-foot-7 Jason Shern, a 30-year-old with a long arrest record — had been escorted out, as well.
“He was hanging outside and then somebody walked up to him and offered him a gun,” Wright said. “He was looking for the player who had jumped him. I was standing right there by the door. I tried to talk him out of it. I said, ‘You don’t want to make that move.’ ”
Wright knew only too well what the scenario could turn into. Fourteen months earlier, 21-year-old Jamahl Moore was shot 15 times outside the A-List. Although he miraculously survived that attack, he was then shot to death in his West Grand Avenue apartment 10 months later.
That initial shooting helped cement the A-List’s reputation as a trouble spot in downtown Dayton. When the club had opened a year prior, Faulkner said, he and representatives of the City of Dayton and the priority board went to the state liquor board hearing and tried to prevent the A-List from getting a license to sell alcohol.
“They didn’t have any kind of business plan, no demographics on who their customers would be and they claimed to be run by some non-profit group,” said Faulkner. “A lot of it just didn’t make sense. They just weren’t equipped for the challenges they’d face.”
Dayton police officials have a Bar Safe program they try to get all bar owners to attend, and most do. “When applied, these practices absolutely, positively work,” Faulkner said. “We have 82 liquor permits downtown — now some businesses have three or four permits for different kinds of sales — but we only have trouble with five or six places in the city.”
Faulkner said the A-List had representatives who attended an early session, “but then they promptly disregarded our advice.” He said after the 2010 shooting, he and the crime prevention officer who runs the Bar Safe program met with A-List reps: “We told them they need armed security at the door. They would be able to enforce rules.”
Wright — who said he thinks his club has gotten “a bad rap” over the years — said he and several other A List employees went to the Bar Safe course: “We got a lot of helpful tips, but at the end of the day — when things start happening in actual time – no safety course tells you how to stop a gunman.”
Part of the problem, Faulkner said, is that along with their regular customers, the club attracts — even markets to — “gangsters.” And he said against a lot of people’s advice, they used promoters to bring in college kids.
Add in alcohol, the macho posturing that goes on in any club, love interests and finally a weapon and you have what can be a fatal mix.
“I live two doors down from Kordero,” Darius Wilson was saying. “Right before he left that night he stopped in to see me and I told him not to go. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be right. They were only charging a dollar. ‘Everybody can afford a dollar,’ I told him. ‘You’re gonna get all kinds of folks in there.’ ”
Wilson was omniscient. Police have reports that the A-List was vastly overcrowded that night.
“It boiled down to a girl talking to one of the football players and a guy from Dayton thought the player was disrespectful to him,” Wright said.
“Sometimes those two different worlds bump into each other and things happen. College kids might come from big cities into a small town like this and stick their chests out. And a local guy might feel he’s got a rough life and he doesn’t give a %
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