‘Scared to lose each other.’ Reeling from 2 deaths, Eau Claire High marks bittersweet graduation
She had just come home from an 18-year-old’s funeral. Neshunda Walters had shared an emotional message before the crowd gathered at Progressive Church in Columbia to celebrate and mourn Sha’Neal Brown and her grandmother.
Walters had barely settled down that Saturday evening when the messages and phone calls started pouring in to her phone. Another of her students at Eau Claire High School had just been killed.
Just like when she had first heard the news of Brown’s passing only two weeks earlier, the high school principal’s mind spiraled straight to disbelief. It couldn’t be.
For the second time in the short span of weeks before graduation, an Eau Claire senior’s life had been taken by violence, this time 17-year-old Bertrand “Troy” Ganaway III.
The back-to-back tragedies have hit acutely hard for the small, tight-knit senior class in a small, tight-knit school.
About 120 Eau Claire seniors will file into Keenan Stadium Wednesday morning, where two empty seats will be left among them. The seniors will wear two ribbons on their gowns, green for Brown and white for Ganaway. Mortarboards will be decorated with tributes to their lost friends — “Once a Shamrock, always a Shamrock”; “Crossing the stage for both of us.”
In a year that’s been tragically distinguished by violence among and toward youth in the Midlands, Eau Claire has experienced that violence distinctly. At least eight teenagers in Richland and Newberry counties have been killed just since April — seven of them by gunfire, two of them Eau Claire seniors.
“We tried to (build) this unity at the beginning of the year, but we didn’t know how important it was going to be by the end of the year,” said Khamiyah Smalls, an 18-year-old who was close friends with Brown since their childhood.
Now unified by a shared grief and a love for one another that’s grown through their pain, the Eau Claire seniors leave their school as more than classmates.
“We’re not friends; it’s more like a family,” said 18-year-old Jada Teasley, who also was close, longtime friends with Brown. “When we’re leaving each other it’s, ‘I love you. Be safe.’ It’s always, ‘I love you.’… We might not see each other tomorrow.”
‘A cloud over the school’
Brown had her prom dress custom-made. She was more prepared than any of her friends for that big, masquerade-themed night. Sha’neal set the bar for many things. She was the life of every party, but what’s more, “She was life,” Smalls said.
Twenty three days after Brown’s death — she and her 83-year-old grandmother, Jessie Brown, were fatally stabbed in their home, allegedly by Sha’Neal’s father — her classmates donned their gowns and suits and partied in her honor, feeling her presence.
But the celebration of prom that night was tinged with the grief of Ganaway’s funeral, held earlier that same day at a downtown Columbia funeral home. Ganaway, a soft-spoken young man who loved to cook and held a job at Cook Out while keeping up with school, died in a shooting May 21 — one week before the prom, 11 days before he would graduate, less than a month before he would turn 18.
On the memorial program for his funeral, a smiling Ganaway was pictured donning his orange Eau Claire graduation mortarboard hat, his gown draped over his shoulder.
The past month of Eau Claire students’ lives, the final days of their senior year, was marred by tragedy. On Wednesday, the seniors walk into their next stages of life having learned lessons beyond their years.
“Typically, we start learning a lot of this growth when you get out of college and you get to the next stage of your life in your 20s,” said Carena Jones, the school’s social worker who leads mentoring and other programs for students. “Our students have, fortunately and unfortunately, been exposed to a lot of things that some of us hadn’t experienced at this point in life. So it’s made them a little bit more mature at this age. ... Them experiencing some of these things at a younger age has prepared them, again fortunately and unfortunately, for things that might happen later in life.”
When Jones first learned of Brown’s death, she said, “I thought the world was coming to an end.”
In her two decades as a school administrator, Walters has experienced student deaths before, but not like this past month. Leading students, teachers and other staff members through this shared grief has been all the more difficult as she grieves herself.
“It puts a cloud over the school. You feel like, this is a time we want to be celebrating. But it was difficult,” the principal said. “You’re talking about a whole community of people … who knew these children, who at some point in time had their hands on them in some way shape or form, who now have experienced trauma. So where we’re now moving forward is how we’re going to grieve together. ... How are we going to heal together?”
On top of the tragedies at home, recent weeks have also seen the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, another mass shooting at a grocery story in a predominantly Black community in Buffalo, New York, and yet another mass shooting close to home, at the Columbiana Centre mall in Columbia. All the violence is weighing heavily on this group of teens and adults in the Eau Claire school community.
“We question, why? Why are people like this?” Teasley said.
In light of Brown’s and Ganaway’s deaths, the students now live with a fear of losing one another, which has drawn them even closer.
Even in their fear, and their awareness of the danger that surrounds them just by living — “There is no true safe place,” Smalls said — these students say they’re inspired by the lives that were taken. They’re inspired to live more fully, knowing that they don’t know when they might not have that chance any longer.
“We love each other more, but we’re also more scared to lose each other. So we value the time, and we value the conversations, and we value the effort,” Smalls said.
‘My friend lived’
Local leaders, from law enforcement to school districts, have responded with anguish and frustration to the recent losses of young lives to violence.
In a statement following Ganaway’s death, Richland 1 school district Superintendent Craig Witherspoon and school board Chairwoman Cheryl Harris said, in part, “We are saddened and alarmed about the recent series of incidents in which young people, including some of our students in Richland 1, have lost their lives due to gun violence. This issue is not a school or district issue; it is a community issue.”
Walters echoed their concern, reflecting on the loss of her students and the overlapping losses of life across the country.
“There’s a much larger issue with weapons, with guns, and we’ve had other issues with a gun on our campus earlier this school year that’s sickening,” Walters said. “When are we going to stop with the thoughts and prayers and make policy changes that are going to truly protect our children? I am fearful.”
Smalls and Teasley suggest that the combination of it all has changed the way teens experience their world now. They tell each other when it’s time to go home, to leave a situation. They’re mindful of other people’s mental health cues. They look for escape routes wherever they go.
This awareness of the violence around them also has made the teens aware of how precious they are to one another. By the way Teasley and Smalls tell it, they are desperate to stick together.
On Tuesday, the day before their graduation, the reality of the milestone was only just beginning to sink in for those two. They thought about Brown — their “favorite friend” — who had overcome and grown so much to arrive at that moment in her cap and gown.
“We came so far. We’ve been waiting on this moment since forever,” Teasley said.
The friends are so proud of what Brown accomplished in her 18 years. She made it, they said. And now they’re going to continue doing what Brown would want for them: They’re going to live fully.
“My friend lived. She lived enough for us to be OK with her being somewhere else,” Smalls said. “Us as her friends, we just make sure that we honor her by remembering we have ourselves, we have each other. Because we had Sha’Neal, and Sha’Neal had us when she was here. Sha’Neal lived life. Sha’Neal lived.”
This story was originally published June 1, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
