ST. LOUIS – #ColinStrong: the words still ring true in St. Louis.
It’s been nearly four months since CBC High School student and hockey player, Colin Brown, of O’Fallon, Illinois, was hit by errant gunfire from a south St. Louis neighborhood, as his father drove him home from a hockey game along Interstate 55.
Colin died days later.
His parents sat down with FOX 2’s Andy Banker Tuesday.
They had much to share, including a letter Colin’s mother, Tracey, found on his bedroom desk shortly after his passing. It was from a former teacher of Colin’s in O’Fallon, written to him long before his death.
“‘I actually look to you as an inspiration of how I want my own son to be when he gets where you are,’” Colin’s mother said, reading from the letter.
His family is still very much surrounded by him in their home, though he’s no longer physically there.
Memorabilia from his Affton and CBC hockey teams is everywhere. His bedroom remains virtually untouched since the November shooting. One of his jerseys is still draped over a kitchen chair.
They continue to struggle greatly. They call Colin the “glue” of his hockey teams and their family. It’s hard to still feel like a family of four with him not here.
“If you were to say 4 minus 1 (and) you still have 3… for me, 4 minus 1 equals none,” said Calvin Brown, Colin’s father. “That’s what our family feels like right now is none. We have to rebuild that and it’s not a mathematical problem. Taking away that one, broke everything. It broke the formula of our family.”
“All I can remember is my younger son screaming, ‘not my Colin, not my Colin!’” Tracey Brown recalled, recalling the moment her husband called her and Colin’s younger brother, Liam, with the news. “Those are the things we have to live with forever now.”
Colin’s father, a retired Illinois State Police Lt. Col., struggles to face not being able to save his son.
“As a dad, as a parent, your number one job in this world is to protect your children,” he lamented. “If it had to be one of us (with Colin that night), I’m glad it was me. My wife, my other son, didn’t have to witness that.”
That police training did pay off, his wife said. He performed CPR on Colin, extending his life.
Colin’s donated organs are credited with saving at least four lives.
“It bought us time. We had some time with colin on life support. We got to lay with him. Friends from CBC and Affton were able to come up and visit him and say their goodbyes, hold his hand, (and) talked to him,” Tracey Brown said. “Lots of people from the hockey community (former St. Louis Blues players): Pat Maroon, Wayne Gretzky, Brett Bull, Barrett Jackman.”
They say the support from St. Louis and beyond has been a lifeline. They never even had to ask for it.
Youth teams nationwide have reached out. There’s also the hospital staff and good Samaritans who stopped to help Calvin in the minutes after the shooting. The list of “thank you’s” seems endless.
Henry Breier, the Catholic Monsignor, who presided over Colin’s memorial service, seemed to just appear at the hospital days earlier.
They’d never met him.
“He came over and he baptized Colin that night at Barnes/Children’s (hospital) and said, ‘Hey, we will do his services if you want,’” Calvin Brown said. “Those types of things happened, just sort of organically, without us having to think about it.”
His hockey teammates keep stepping up, even decorating what was a family Christmas tree with their own “custom” ornaments. The tree still stands in their living room.
“We will never take it down. It’s not a Christmas tree, it’s a Colin tree,” Tracey Brown said. “It will stay there as long as we are here. He loved every single second of playing hockey. He loved his teammates. I mean, Colin just loved it.”
It’s all been a lift for Liam, 15, just 18 months younger than Colin.
He’s also a hockey player who plans to follow Colin’s footsteps in transferring to CBC High School.
“Right now, our whole focus is on saving our other son because he’s lost his best friend,” Tracey Brown said. “(Colin) was very much the glue in this family.”