Mark Woods: When the life of a teacher involves the deaths of former students.
Over the holidays, Mary Maraghy read another news story with another familiar name.
Another former student, shot and killed.
She figures that makes eight.
“At least,” she said last week. “Maybe more.”
She puts together a list off the top of her head, in no particular order, other than they’re all students who passed through her portable classroom at Westside High, all made her laugh or smile at one time, and all are now dead.
Delmontae Davis
Randolph Brice
Marcus George
Raheem Hutchinson
Paton Pinette
Rick James
Baron Dixon
Zachary Willis
She, of course, isn’t the only teacher who can put together a list like this. There are many others in this city, in this country. Some undoubtedly and sadly with much longer lists.
I just happen to be aware of Mary Maraghy losing another former student, and posting a few gut-wrenching sentences on Facebook, because we’re former co-workers.
She was a writer at the Times-Union. I can picture where she sat in the old newsroom and what she said when she left the paper in 2010. She loved being a reporter, but even after 18 years, she could make more money as a first-year teacher.
So with her family to think about, a husband and two children, she took the leap and became a ninth-grade English teacher at Oakleaf High School.
“I didn’t know what I was doing and those kids destroyed me,” she said. “I got fired. Well, non-reappointed, which is fired.”
She found another job at Westside High, where her husband taught social studies. A lot of her students come from poor families. They’re dealing with things that kids at some other schools don’t have to deal with. They’re also brutally honest, genuine, funny. And right from the beginning, she loved teaching them.
She teaches journalism. She has trouble getting kids interested in it as a career. She tries to tell them it’s storytelling. And she knows they have all kinds of stories to tell.
Randolph Brice
“He was a character,” she said. “They all were.”
He might’ve been the funniest. He had a prosthetic leg that often became a prop for some physical comedy. He’d kick it off during class, just to get a laugh. Sometimes he’d get carried away and she’d call his mother, who memorably said to pass along a message to her son: tell that one-legged SOB he better behave.
When the kids in her yearbook class recorded skits to encourage other students to buy yearbooks, Brice’s group came up with one built around him asking a classmate if you could use food stamps. When the classmate told him no, he kicked off his leg in anger.
The skit ended with them holding up the prosthetic and saying: Buy a yearbook, it won’t cost you an arm and a leg.
The class loved that one. She says the whole school loved Brice. The security guards were always cutting up with him.
At some point, she learned how he lost a leg.
In middle school, he was in a car with some kids. They had a gun. They were messing around and he shot himself.
She knew the prosthetic wasn’t always funny. One day Brice’s mother told Ms. Maraghy he was having a bad day. He was still growing and sometimes he’d end up between prosthetics. Sometimes he’d get depressed.
Still, he told his teacher that losing a leg was a blessing. He learned not to mess around with guns, not to keep hanging with that crowd.
Losing his leg, he said, saved his life.
“I believed him,” she said. “But I guess it wasn’t true. He ended up shot dead.”
When she says this— and when she tells the stories of other former students — twists like this come abruptly, just like they did in real life.
She thinks Randolph Brice might’ve been the first former student she learned had been killed.
She knows for sure he wasn’t the last.
“He was was a character,” she said. “They all were.”
Some of the deaths made the news. Some did not. And it’s hard to say which is sadder.
It reminds Maraghy of when she started off as a reporter, straight out of UCF, covering the police beat in Sanford for the Orlando Sentinel. She says she had a potty mouth and so did the cops. So she fit right in.
Going through the police reports was just part of the job. It was like a game. She didn’t know the victims she wrote about. And even when she learned about them, even when she could have a sense of sadness and empathy, it was different from what she has experienced as a teacher, hearing about another homicide in Jacksonville and instinctively fearing it’s another former student.
“I’ll think, ‘Oh, God, please don’t be one of our kids,’” she said.
Raheem Hutchinson
He and a classmate made a rap song about passing the FCAT. They sang it over the PA at school.
She says he was a good kid.
She says, as far as she’s concerned, they all were.
“Maybe I am super naive,” she said. “They were all so good to me. Respectful, bright, entertaining as hell.”
Marcus George
He graduated in 2015. Maraghy remembers him encouraging everyone in class. He always seemed to be smiling, laughing. She still is friends with his foster mother.
He was shot at a gas station on 103rd Street in April 2021.
Maraghy went to George’s funeral and watched as his birth mother crawled into the casket, screaming.
Baron Dixon
He worked at a seafood place. He’d come to class tired and dirty and smelly. But he’d give her a hug and say, “I made it.”
He loved cars. Loved fixing them up.
As is the case with a lot of her former students, she lost track of him. Until he made the news Christmas Day 2022.
“He was found dead, shot in his car,” she said.
His family said he was heading home Christmas afternoon in a car he had bought, planning to repair it and sell it, start a lawn mowing business and put his fiance through nursing school.
He was shot at the intersection of Normandy Boulevard and Chaffee Road. He was 21.
Two months later …
Delmontae Davis
His nickname was “Smoke.” He was a star wrestler. He also was one of Ms. Maraghy’s favorite students. Just talking about Smoke brings a smile to her face, followed by a shake of her head.
“He was shot in the head, breaking up a fight,” she said.
That was last February. By the end of the year, according to Times-Union statistics, the homicide tally had hit 157 — down from 168 in 2022, but still the fourth time in the last five years that it topped 150.
In March, Maraghy lost her husband, Gerry. He’d been sick for a while. She says he’s the one who “dragged her into teaching.”
By the numbers: 157 people died by homicide in Jacksonville in 2023. Here's who died, where and how
She and an art teacher went to Smoke’s funeral. When Maraghy returned to school in the fall, she had two of his stepsiblings in her class. They remembered her as “the white lady from the funeral.”
Most of the former students who have died have been Black. But not all of them. The one common denominator, she says, has been guns.
Zachary Willis
He was still a student, 16 years old. He loved the Florida Gators and skateboarding. Police said he accidentally shot himself in the head.
That happened in 2012. So maybe he was the first. By this point, she worries about who’s next.
She goes on break for the 2023 holidays and …
Paton Pinette
She remembers going through the names during roll call at the start of one year, reading off his and saying: It is Pay-ton?
Actually, this little blond-haired kid told her, it’s pronounced Puh-tawn, making it sound almost like a French name.
She found out he was just messing with her.
That was years ago. She had his younger sister in her class a few years ago. That’s who told her about what happened two days after Christmas.
The news stories said Jacksonville police shot and killed a man they said fired at them first during a standoff on the Westside. The police identified him as 26-year-old Paton John Pinette.
Maraghy doesn’t claim to know exactly what led to his death, or really to any of her former students’ deaths.
“So many questions,” she said. “I wish I knew the answers.”
The holiday break ended and she returned to school last week, at age 57, the top of her spiky hair freshly dyed bright colors. Suffice it to say, the students aren’t the only characters in her classroom. Since becoming a teacher, she’s also added a tattoo to her right forearm. Nellie Bly, the female journalist who became famous in the late 1800s, going undercover at a mental health asylum and exposing terrible conditions.
She says she misses being in a newsroom. I say that while we miss having her in ours, she seems meant to be in her classroom, with her students.
Sometimes people ask how she does it. Not just how she does the job. How she seems to see the good in all of the kids who pass through her classroom.
“I only see them for 90 minutes every other day,” she says. “It's easy to love a kid for 90 minutes every other day.”
The hard part is losing another one, worrying it won’t be the last time.
mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: For some teachers, losing former students to gun violence part of job
