“Back up in Chicago, Kordero’s dad goes to the cemetery like clockwork. Down here, I pretty much reflect on his life, but I’m pretty private about it.”
She takes out the birthday card he gave her less than two months before he was shot. The handwriting reminds her of him and the message he wrote still fills her heart. It covers the blank space on both sides of the card and includes this passage:
“As of 7/17/2011 I can honestly say that the things you have taught me will stick around for another lifetime and I will pass them on to my children…I love you so much Mom.”
Although Kordero is buried in Chicago’s Mt. Greenwood Cemetery – beneath a stone that has a picture of him at the top and his No. 24 CSU helmet at the bottom – his message has never been more vibrant and alive.
Having played the best game of his budding college career 13 days prior at Cleveland Browns Stadium, Kordero was an innocent bystander when he was shot outside the A-List Lounge, a troubled club on S. Ludlow Street, by Jason Shern, a guy with a long rap sheet and a short fuse.
Shern had been kicked out of the overcrowded bar when tensions had risen between local guys – some with gang affiliations like he had, police said – and unsuspecting college kids, most brought in by buses from their campus 25 miles away.
Kordero’s death devastated his mom, his dad, Kevin Sr., and his only sibling, Kevin Jr., who was five years older.
Kim said the senselessness and terrible finality of the act temporarily upended her beliefs system:
“I grew up in a two-parent home, just as our boys did, and we subscribed to traditional values. I believed you didn’t lose a child by sending them to college.”
A high school guidance counselor on Chicago’s South Side, she realized she needed guidance, and she said it came unexpectedly from one of her son’s CSU teammates:
“He came up to me at the funeral and said, ‘Miss Hunter, you don’t know me, but your son helped me so much. He meant a lot to me.’
“That was the fuel that ignited me. I’d known that one day Kordero had wanted to be a counselor, too – he’d told me, ‘Mom, you don’t know how rough it is out there for some guys,’ – so I told myself, ‘OK Kim, you got to do something and make Kordero’s life count.’”
She ended up launching the Kordero Hunter MVP Foundation.
As she once explained to me, MVP stood for Man’s Valuable Purpose and the concept came from the biblical verse Proverbs 22:6, which proclaims:
“Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
A remarkable effort by a remarkable woman, the MVP Foundation found value in young men who, when you first met them, had far more in common with Kordero’s killer than Kordero himself.
She said if she could redirect guys with gang ties, behavior problems, incarcerations in their pasts, they might not commit a horrific act like the one that took her 21-year-old son; and other parents wouldn’t be getting the middle of the night phone call and devastating news like she and her ex-husband did.
She came up with the curriculum that trained MVP students in all kinds of jobs; provided mental health evaluations; helped in dealing with domestic violence; and pushed young men toward constructive involvement in their communities.
There were outings to sporting events and introductions to people who could serve as role models.
That led to MVP success stories. After graduating from high school, several guys went to college and now have their own jobs, families and careers.
“One is now working as a social worker himself,” she said proudly. “That dude is on fire!”
She did such a good job that she was hired by GRO Community (GRO), a non-profit mental health organization that address the severe impacts of prolonged exposure to violence and trauma among low economic men – especially those from “the black and brown communities,” she said – and provides avenues back into a productive life.
Five years ago, she moved to Houston, Texas and became GRO’s Chief of Clinical Training and Director of Diversion Services.
Again, she’s built the curriculum and gun diversion is her focus.
GRO Community uses federal data that shows the recidivism rate of firearm offenders is 68 percent, compared to 46 percent by non-firearm offenders.
Aside from that, she’s also relaunched the MVP Foundation, this time awarding scholarships to young men who are going into social work and counseling.
That she’s willing to do all this, even in the very city where her son’s life was taken, gives weight to another effort that has recently been launched, Kim said, by Devrance Fisher, a Central State alum and former Marauders football staffer and administrator, and some of Kordero’s former teammates.
They have asked the school – specifically athletics director Kevicia Brown – to consider either retiring Kordero’s No. 24 jersey or giving it special significance to be worn by a CSU student who makes an impact at the school or with his team.
Kim said to date they haven’t heard back on their requests.
Neither has she.
To be fair, Brown, much of the administration and all the current football coaches are new to the program and likely don’t know how Kordero’s death rocked the school and the program back in 2011.
The Marauders – who ended up 1-10 that season – never quite recovered from the traumatic loss of their teammate two games into the season, though they tried.
Before each game they would break their final sidelines huddle with a salute to Kordero.
A bench beneath a crabapple tree on campus was dedicated to Kordero and Jasmine Crenshaw, a track athlete who drowned in Florida six months earlier.
Inside the locker room; on an office wall of then head coach E.J. Junior; and next to the elevator at McPherson Stadium there were posters bearing Kordero’s picture.
Those posters are all gone now and few people around the program remember Kordero Hunter.
‘A senseless, cowardly act’
As Kevin Sr. once stressed to me:
“What needs to come out about Kordero is that he and his brother were raised right, Kordero wasn’t a street kid. He came from a good family that believed in education, believed in books over guns and working and paying taxes and voting and being good citizens.
“He had a foundation.”
Kim stressed the example set by her ex-husband: “The boys were raised by a very strong African American man; a good provider; just a positive influence in their lives.”
She was the same and it showed.
Kevin Jr., went on to get a master’s degree, married and his son is now a freshman in high school, and an athlete of note himself.
Kordero, who had an abundance of personality, but could also be headstrong and sometimes impulsive, starred on his Hillcrest High team in Country Club Hills, a south suburb of Chicago.
He went to Northern Illinois University – as Kevin Jr. did – but ended up redshirting his first season.
His friend from high school was going to Central State and Kordero soon transferred to join him.
He ended up a starting cornerback and though CSU decisively lost the second game of the season – the Cleveland Classic to North Carolina Central – he played well, and E.J. Junior mentioned that afterward.
Two days before the third game – a matchup with the University of Dayton at McPherson Stadium – an outside promoter came to the CSU campus to trumpet the gala College Night for CSU students at the A-List Lounge, which was owned by a CSU alum and employed several former CSU students.
Two buses were provided for transportation, and the cover charge was dropped to $1.
Because the buses filled, Kordero took the red Charger his dad had gotten him. Before leaving his Xenia apartment, he phoned his grandmother and then talked to his dad who told him to have fun, but be careful.
“He told me not to worry, that he’d be with friends,” Kevin Sr. said.
The CSU students didn’t understand what they were stepping into Dayton police said later.
The A-List had had plenty of trouble previously, including when Jamahl Moore had been shot 15 times at the club several months earlier.
He survived, only to be shot to death 10 months later in his Grand Avenue apartment.
Fire officials said the A-List’s maximum capacity was 99. That night there were over 300 people crammed in the bar and trouble soon erupted.
Police said the 6-foot-7 Shern had ties to the notorious local gang, the Dayton View Hustlers, who were responsible for four murders the year before.
Shern had an arrest record going back a decade and he had just been released from prison two months earlier. On that fateful night witnesses said a girl handed him a gun after he’d been kicked out of the club.
He shot Kordero in the abdomen. A girl was shot in the neck. Two other people were injured, one from flying glass, the other was trampled.
Although several people, fearing retaliation, refused to testify, there were enough eye witnesses – including club owner Demetrius Wright who told me he had stood next to Kordero and seen the shooting – that Shern, already on parole, accepted a plea deal in order to get certain gun charges dropped.
He pled guilty to second degree murder and was to be sentenced in the Montgomery Common County Peas courtroom of Judge Michael Tucker.
Although the courtroom was under the watchful eyes of seven police officers, it was packed and tensions ran high, especially when Shern’s family had several vocal outbursts supporting Jason who showed little remorse during the proceedings.
One of Shern’s sisters was kicked out of court and outside she continued her rant: “He ain’t an animal!”
Shern’s mother, Carla Harbut, made the incredulous claim: “My son made a few mistakes in life that he’s regretting now, but that’s no reason for anyone to judge him.”
The comments especially cut Kim Hunter deeply. It hurt that Shern’s mother couldn’t connect to her, mother to mother, and acknowledge the pain she felt in losing her son.
The callousness of the killing and the courtroom behavior overcame Kordero’s dad and brother when they made their presentencing statements.
“You killed him for nothing,” Kevin Sr. said as his voice rose in pitch and tears streamed down his face while he glared at Shern. “Everything we did to get Kordero to this point you snuffed out in an instant. Like it was nothing!”
Kevin Jr. was more pointed: “This was a senseless, cowardly act. Someone with such a bright future was killed by a worthless human being. Words can’t express how I feel for you right now, Jason.
“I hope you burn in hell.”
Shern was sentenced to 15 years to life, which means he comes up for parole next year.
Kevin Sr. vowed never to set foot in Dayton again and Kevin Jr, added:
“Since Kordero was lost, Dayton, and the state of Ohio in general, had kind of been off the map for us. And that’s unfortunate because I’m sure the city has a lot of good people and great things to offer.”
‘Forever connection’
That makes the GRO Community venture into Dayton – which Kim has promoted – even more meaningful.
It continues her effort to change a negative into a positive.
And our community – which lately has been besieged by gun violence, especially incidents involving young people – can certainly use it.
In the process Kim has done the unimaginable.
She said she has forgiven Jason Shern:
“I had to forgive him. It’s the only way I’d be able to do the work that I do now. Because every day now I see some guys who remind me of Jason and his mindset.
“And when one of them comes back and tells me how it changed his life, I know it’s all because of Kordero.
“That continues to show me that my son mattered and he’s still contributing to this world. So I feel like it gives me a forever connection to him.
“In this way – my son, his name and what he was about – stays alive.”
I remember the day after Kordero was murdered, the Marauders hosted the Dayton Flyers at McPherson Stadium.
In a season when they were beaten by 29-or-more points six times, the grieving Marauders played inspired football and led the Flyers at halftime, before falling 17-7.
To honor their teammate, the CSU players had draped Kordero’s jerseys – upon which many of them had written remembrances beforehand –over one of their sideline benches.
Throughout the game, players were drawn to that memorial, and they seemed to draw strength from it.
It’s in that vein that Kordero’s jersey should be given special prominence again.
With what is happening thanks to his mom and his memory in Dayton and Cincinnati and Texas and Chicago – and soon other cities and states, as well – he is making as great of an impact on others as any Marauders’ athlete ever has.
And because of that, anyone connected to CSU - students, athletes, coaches, alums, fans – needs to have a “forever connection” to him as well.
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