“If you’ve never lost a child, it’s a different hurt,” said Raburn’s stepfather David Rhodes.
“We were there with him. I performed CPR on him until EMS got there. But he ended up passing away…he was gone.”
Raburn, 31, died after a four-year fight with leukemia.
When family members realized what had happened, Rhodes said, they went to work trying to get Raburn’s body back to Nashville.
“Bryant is in Salt Lake City, in a cargo hold, and we don’t know how to get him to Nashville,” Rhodes said. “I was stonewalled everywhere I called ... Delta told me the soonest he could get here was Sunday night, and I said that was unacceptable. It seemed they had taken all of their cargo pilots and crew and put them on passenger flights.”
A trip to the Nashville airport to work with Delta managers was also frustrating. After hours of discussions, Delta found a flight that would get Raburn back to Nashville just one hour before his memorial service.