Even if her son were alive, Reign Harris would probably not be spending any time with him this Thanksgiving holiday.
For the last dozen years or so of his life, Jaz Granderson didn’t have much to do with his mom.
“Jaz wouldn’t come around,†Harris says. “He would pass messages to me now and then through a friend’s aunt.â€
Granderson, who was 27, was an up-and-coming assistant football coach at De Smet High School before Oct. 16 in an apparent carjacking. Three suspects in his death were indicted last week on federal charges related to multiple carjackings, including the one that led to his death.
Granderson was a mentor to young men, a coach with a bright future.
There was a packed house at Central Baptist Church in midtown for his funeral.
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Harris was there. But you hardly would have known it.
She sat in the third row.
The obituary passed out to most of the attendees didn’t mention her name.
A letter from Congressman Lacy Clay that was sent to her was read as though it had been sent to somebody else.
“It was horrible and I sat through it,†Harris says. “I couldn’t believe it was going down like that. I didn’t get an opportunity to mourn my son.â€
It was, though, the sort of thing that sometimes happens after divorces.
Husbands and wives go different ways. Kids are caught in the middle.
Harris, 52, who is a dispatcher for the city of ºüÀêÊÓƵ, grew up in Carr Square Village. She still lives in the 5th Ward that encompasses the near north side and parts of downtown. Last year she ran unsuccessfully for alderman.
Harris and Jaz’s father, Johnny Granderson, were married from 1985 to 2000. They had two children.
Jaz was 10 when the couple divorced. He was 14 when he went to live with his dad. It wasn’t an uncommon story. Harris had remarried. Her older kids — she had since adopted three more — went to live with their father. They drifted away.
Of course, none of that mattered when her son died.
On that day, she got the call from the police department. She left work, went home and then went to the morgue, where she identified Jaz’s body. It was the sort of moment no mother wants to imagine, no matter the age of a child or circumstances of their death.
That the funeral — planned by Jaz’s father — seemed to cut her out of her son’s life story made the pain that much worse.
“It was like getting kicked while I was down,†Harris says. After the funeral, she and her family held their own repast at The Ambassador, a banquet hall in north ºüÀêÊÓƵ County. They talked about how hard it was to keep it together at the funeral, so the focus that day could be on a young man whose life was lost too early.
“God held me,†she says.
A couple of weeks after she was at The Ambassador, another family held a post-funeral event there.
It ended in violence.
after a dispute near the entrance to the hall erupted in gunfire.
When that happened, Harris thought back to her own son’s funeral, to some of the young men in her extended family who were angry over what she called a disrespectful spectacle.
“People wonder why this sort of thing happens,†she said. “It’s because of the same kind of thing I dealt with. That’s not the way to handle things, but it just happens when people don’t know how else to handle it.â€
Her eldest son is gone this Thanksgiving. His funeral is behind her, and his alleged killers in custody.
Despite the rage she overcame, Harris has a grateful heart.
She’s grateful for the life her son lived, for children and family, and for a God that helped her keep her emotions in check when she was screaming in pain on the inside.