By Theresa Olsteen, Crenshaw High School
I used to think that the one thing I could never speak about was the death of my brother. When it first happened, I couldn’t talk about it with anyone and didn’t want to think about it. Out of all of my family members I think that it hit my mom, his twin, and myself the hardest.
I didn’t believe it until the funeral. Although I cried when they told me he was gone, his death became real at his funeral.
His death wasn’t his fault. He went to the store with one of his friends earlier in the evening before the incident. His friend got in an altercation with a Hispanic man and that turned into a fight. From what I heard, my brother’s friend Red won the fight and the man left with cuts and bruises. After the fight my brother Kevin and Red returned to our house where they hung out.
After a couple of hours Kevin decided that he needed to go back to the store and his twin Keith told him that he shouldn’t. Knowing Kevin he didn’t listen. When he got back to the store the Hispanic man and one of his friends had been waiting there for him. Before he walked in the store the men shot him three times in the chest with a shoot gun. Kevin died right there on the spot.
The reason why I think that it hit me so hard is because we were really close. I talked to him about everything and he always listened. He was there for me when I thought that I was all by myself. He was my oldest brother and although he was mean at times, he was really nice. As days went by after his death I thought that I couldn’t live without him. He was the person that I would turn to when things got hard and rocky for me but I had to deal with it alone because he was gone.
Most of the time I isolated myself from everyone and everything. My mom thought that I was never going to talk again.
The way that I got through it alone was by picking up a book and sitting on our roof, where I was by myself, to read. It kind of got my mind off of it but I still couldn’t stop thinking about him.
The first person that I started talking to after the whole incident was his twin, my other brother Keith. I knew that we had to be going through the same thing because they where each other’s shadow. They went everywhere together.
After he and I started talking I started feeling better and now I feel like I can talk about it freely. Thank you for listening.
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