“I asked her, ‘Mama, what you cryin’ for?’ And she said, ‘I’m just so, so proud of you. You’ve come a long way.’ ”
Chereece Rule wasn’t just talking about the nine-hour drive she and her son — known to everyone as Skip — had just made from their Kansas City, Mo., home to the CSU campus.
Before that trip in August 2012, he had seemed a lot farther from a berth on an NCAA Division II basketball team than a one-day excursion:
Although he’d been a formidable player for Coach Benny Moore’s Center High School team in Kansas City, his classroom struggles had made four-year colleges, in Moore’s words, “shy away because they knew academically he would not qualify.”
Instead, Skip ended up at a pair of junior colleges. He played one season at Moberly Area Community College in Columbia, Mo., and then, because he said he and the coach didn’t mesh, he switched to Independence Community College in Kansas.
At about that same time Scott Smith, his best friend and a former teammate — someone he considered “my brother” — was visiting him at his Lydia Avenue home in K.C. late one night when he was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting.
“It was crazy,” Skip said in a voice barely more than a whisper. “The (shooter) had come to my crib looking for me, looking for revenge or retaliation or something. I had gotten into a little altercation at a party and the guy drove by and the shadows in the window made Scott look bigger and I guess they thought it was me. They shot him in the stomach and he died right there in my mother’s arms.”
Against all that struggle and failure and loss, Skip saw little future promise until CSU, unexpectedly learned of him, did some investigating and, without ever seeing him play in person, invited him to join the Marauders.
Skip would have to redshirt and improve his grades, but he figured it was his only chance to play at an NCAA Division II school, so he agreed to come to CSU, sight unseen.
He and his 39-year-old mother made the trip with his girlfriend, Sharron Mott, and his mom’s friend.
“We got to campus and my mom helped me pack my room at the basketball house and she put things in the refrigerator,” he said. “When she got ready to go back to her hotel in Dayton, she began crying.
“She said, ‘I just want you to stay focused. I want you to do your basketball thing and get your grades and get a degree. … I just want you make it.’
“And I told her, ‘OK mama, I promise you I will.’ ”
‘Surprised us all’
The phone call came before dawn the next morning. It was his girlfriend and she was sobbing.
“She said the police came knocking at the hotel door looking for my mom,” Skip said. “They wouldn’t give her any information — except go say there had been a car accident — but they wanted to talk to me…now.”
Although Skip barely knew anyone at CSU, he awoke teammate Masceo Harmon, who had a car, and got him to drive him to the Dayton hotel.
“The (desk) lady had me call the sheriff and he told me what happened,” Skip said. “He said, ‘Your mother didn’t make it.’ When I heard that, I was just devastated. All of a sudden I felt like a whole different person. I wasn’t me no more. I was out of it and kept asking the Lord, ‘Why me? Why my mother?…Why?’ ”
Earlier that night the answer had come barreling the wrong way along I-75 and slammed head on into the Chevy Blazer that held Chereece and her friend David Wilson.
Rachel Schidecker, an 18-year-old Milton Union High graduate from Laura, was driving a 2002 Ford Explorer north in a southbound lane. According to 9-1-1 calls, it appeared she had driven the wrong way for almost four miles. She’s thought to have entered the interstate via an exit ramp in downtown Dayton and then hit the Blazer driven by Wilson at mile marker 57 in Harrison Township.
The impact sent the Blazer flying into a tractor trailer rig, where it got wedged in the under-carriage and was dragged down the highway and then burst into flames. Badly burned and suffering several broken bones, Wilson was partially ejected and ended up being pulled from the flames by passing motorists.
Those same rescuers heard Chereece’s screams but couldn’t reach her through the wreckage and fire and she died at the scene.
Shidecker’s vehicle, meanwhile, had caromed into another car head-on and that vehicle spun and was hit by a van. In all, eight people were involved in the accident and five were injured.
Chereece was the lone fatality.
Shidecker, who suffered a scratch, was found to have a blood-alcohol content of .236, over 10 times the legal limit for a person under the age of 21 and nearly three times the limit for an adult.
She told state troopers she was at a friend’s house earlier but claimed to remember nothing. A cooler and broken beer bottles reportedly were found in her car. Before the accident she had posted photos to her Twitter account, one showing her grinning and giving a thumbs-up sign as she held a wine bottle and another of her in a taxicab tipping a beer can to her lips.
She was not taken into custody that night. It would be more than three months until the Montgomery County Prosecutor’s Office approved of aggravated vehicular homicide charges and 7 ½ months until she was arrested.
In the immediate aftermath of the accident, Skip and his family were left reeling.
“As soon as we found out what happened, we picked him up and he stayed with us two days until we got him a flight back to Kansas City,” said CSU head coach Donte Jackson. “We have this (team) chant where we always say ‘1-2-3 Marauders…4-5-6 family.’ Well, this was time for real family.
“Our president, Dr. (Cynthia) Jackson-Hammond came over with her husband. So did Jahan Culbreath, our athletic director. We all just sat down with Skip and assured him we were there for him.”
Yet, when Skip went home for his mother’s funeral, which packed the New Bethel Church and left throngs standing outside, no one expected he would return to CSU:
“After what happened, I figured we can chalk that up, I guarantee, you,” said Jacque Johnson, Chereece’s mother and Skip’s grandma. “I figured he is gonna get so depressed, so despondent that he’s never gonna play again.”
Coach Moore felt the same way: “I thought he’d want to get another start somewhere else. I didn’t think he’d be able to go back to where his mom died — I don’t think I could have done it. But he surprised us all.
“I’ve got to give Skip the utmost credit and respect. He didn’t quit.”
Dominant force
During her lunch break at the pharmaceutical research company where she works, Jacque started her grandson’s story with a question: “Do you know the whole history?”
She said Chereece became pregnant with him as a junior in high school. The boy’s father wasn’t really in the picture, so Jacque took care of the baby so her only daughter could finish high school.
“He wasn’t three months old and he got very ill,” she said. “I kept taking him to the doctor and at first they told me I was just an over-concerned grandmother. But it turned out that a layer of his abdomen had not closed properly at birth, it sucked some intestines through and then started to close and that part of the intestines was strangulated.
“Finally one Sunday my son said, ‘Mama, it looks like he’s gonna die.’ I grabbed him up and we were rushing to Children’s Mercy when he coded. We were right near a fire station and I jumped out of the car and ran him in there and they took him from there.
“Long story short, he had surgery to remove a lot of his intestines and doctors told us he wouldn’t get very big — that it would stunt his growth.”
She started to laugh: “He was a scrawny, skinny thing for a good while, but oh my goodness! About fifth grade he started growing…and growing…and growing.”
By junior high she said he was 6-foot-4 or so and “pretty heavy.” He tried out for basketball, but as his grandmother put it, “he sucked.” And Skip said other kids “really dogged me” about it.
In high school he began to tone up some and soon made a name for himself in football and basketball.
“Skip was a very good player for us, a real dominant force in the middle,” said Moore. “We hadn’t had a player like him for probably 10 years before that. Nor have we since.”
In the classroom, it was a different story.
“He didn’t pick up academically and he’d get so upset and finally he just didn’t want to put any effort into studying,” Jacque said. “That led him to getting in trouble in school and his mother and I were constantly being called in.”
Moore said that reputation wasn’t a true read on who Skip was: “Down deep he’s a kid who has a good heart. He’d give you his last dollar.”
Patrick Nee, formerly the head coach at Independence, saw those same traits and told CSU assistant Eric Salter, who was working at a Kansas summer camp, that he still had an unsigned kid who “could be a difference maker.”
“With our limited recruiting budget we aren’t flying kids in here and we’re not flying an assistant out there three or four times to look at them either,” Donte Jackson said. “At the end of the day a lot of what we do is word of mouth and trust. That’s how I was with Skip.
“I saw films and then I talked on the phone to him, his mom … and grandma.”
Jacque remembers the conversation: “He told us he had a plan and if Skip bought into it, he’d not only become a better basketball player, but he could get an education and a degree.”
Jackson said that while he certainly wants to win basketball games, it’s more than that with him: “The most important thing to me is that, as a black man, I can give another black man a real chance to be successful.”
Jacque said her grandson realized the depth of CSU’s embrace when his mother was killed:
“Because of the way Central State treated him when this happened – the respect they showed, the care and the love – he fell in love with the school.
“And the Monday after his mother’s funeral, he returned to Central State.”
Dedicated to Mom
Although it has been 18 months since his mother was killed, Skip said it’s still a daily struggle for him.
“I pray every day that God gives me the strength and wisdom to deal with all this,” he said as he unconsciously rubbed a thumb across the wooden cross he wears every day around his neck.
In the room he rents from a woman who lives near campus, he has a special blue t-shirt he had made to commemorate his mother.
It has several photos of her and on one side says “Rest Well Mama… We Love You.” On the other, it reads “The Family Loves You…We Gone (sic) Make It For You.”
While he and his family deal with the loss, Shidecker, who faces multiple charges — including two counts of aggravated vehicular homicide and two counts of operating a vehicle while intoxicated — is home and under house arrest.
Her trial is scheduled to begin June 10 — which, ironically, would have been Chereece’s 41st birthday.
“Just about all of us will be at the trial,” Jacque said. “I don’t know if my granddaughter (Lexus) will go. She said she can’t sit in the same room with the girl who killed her mom.
“When it happened it felt like my world had stopped. That lady — Rachel… Rachel Shidecker… took my baby away. But I don’t have a hard heart towards her. I’m not in this to see her spend the rest of her life in prison. That’s not going to bring Chereece back. But I’d like to see her get help so she never takes somebody else’s child or mother away from them. I don’t want anybody else to feel this hurt.”
The way Skip has tried to deal with that — after sitting out last year as a redshirt — has been by dedicating this basketball season to his mom.
And the junior big man has done quite a job of that.
When he stays out of foul trouble (there was one game when he collected his five personals in 10 minutes, another when it took just 15), he has been a force for the Marauders, who have won six of their last seven, five on the road.
In victories over three West Virginia schools, he had 27 points and 11 rebounds at Salem International, 19 points and 10 rebounds at Alderson Broaddus and 22 and 11 at Davis and Elkins.
He’s the Marauders’ second-leading scorer this season (12.2 per game), their top rebounder (6.8) and is third in the entire Great Midwest Athletic Conference in field=goal percentage (62.2), fifth in rebounding 10th in blocked shots and 14th in scoring.
“What I hadn’t expected was that he’s a real vocal leader,” said Jackson. “When one of your best players can say the right thing at the right time, it makes a real difference on a team.
“Honestly, this is the type kid you really root for, the type player any coach wants to be a part of his legacy. With all the adversity he’s faced in his life, Skip’s had every reason to tank it, but he never has.”
As Jacque explained it: “He said, ‘My mother lost her life helping me get a new life.’ ”
Skip said he will never forget that:
“There’s no way I could have given up or quit. If I did that, I’d feel like a failure to my family, to myself…and to my mama. That’s not what she wanted. I can’t forget my promise to her.”
Nor can he forget her tears.
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