Family, friends look back a year after
former Oakland Mills star dies following shooting
A defender
Trips to Oakland Mills to watch games and see former coaches had become fairly common. For the soft-spoken Aaron, the school was practically a second home. So in many ways, his return visit in late December 2017 — shortly after completing his redshirt freshman season at Marshall — was just part of the routine.
Only this time, as he peered across the tables at the group of junior varsity basketball players gathered for study hall in the media center, he had a different agenda.
“Larry took it upon himself to pop in and speak to all the kids … about how he had some academic struggles in high school and it almost cost him, and how that piece of it was just as important as what you do on the court,” recalled Oakland Mill varsity boys basketball coach Jon Browne. “And if you know Larry, that’s not something he would normally do.
“But I think, though, that right there was a sign of the man he had become.”
As Aaron put it in February 2018, he once was the one sitting on the other side of that table.
“Honestly, looking back, if it wasn’t for my coaches — coach [Tom] Browne football and coach [Jon] Browne basketball — I wouldn’t have been in college,” Aaron said. “Outside of my family, I owe everything to them, both athletically and academically.
Aaron was up at Oakland Mills almost every day for one reason or another over the final weeks of December 2017.
The rest of his free time on winter break was spent with his girlfriend, Ashanti Blount — who Aaron had been dating since his junior year of high school — or hanging around old friends such as Shawn Harris, who he had known since kindergarten.
New Year’s Eve was no different.
Word of a party in Severn spread through Snapchat, and Aaron, along with six close friends, decided to go. By the time they arrived around 10:30 p.m., the house — host to more than 100 guests over the course of the evening — was packed.
After spending a few minutes in the living room, Aaron, Harris and their friends headed upstairs to hang out until after the ball dropped in New York at midnight. The crowd thinned, but just past 12:30 a.m., the night took a turn for the worse.
“I went outside and then when I came back in, these dudes had started arguing,” Aaron said. “Everybody thought they were just going to go outside and start fighting or whatever.”
What started as a verbal disagreement, however, quickly escalated.
“All of a sudden there were gunshots,” said Harris, who was seated inside on the steps when the first shot was fired. “The first couple ones sounded like BBs almost, not that loud or whatever. But then you could hear the loud ones, like the real bullets. My instinct was to immediately run upstairs and I’m thinking everyone was right behind me.”
Aaron never made it to the stairs. He said he never even thought to run. Instead, his instinct was to immediately throw his body in front of his girlfriend standing next to him.
“[My reaction] was just to get in front her and protect her,” Aaron said. “I wasn’t thinking that I could potentially get hit or anything. Then all of a sudden, I couldn’t feel my legs.”
Aaron fell to the ground, numb. Just as quickly as the ringing gunshots subsided, they were replaced by the screams of people chaotically darting around him.
He searched for answers, but found nothing.
“I didn’t feel anything,” he said. “I actually thought I was just in shock at first because I didn’t see [a] bullet wound.”
When he rolled over, though, the gunshot wound in the middle of his back became visible. Lodged between the T6 and T7 vertebrae in his thoracic spinal column, the bullet had immediately paralyzed him from the waist down.
The ambulances arrived within minutes, and Aaron was placed on a stretcher headed for the Maryland Shock Trauma Center. Harris made an emotional call to Aaron’s mother, Melissa, to tell her what happened then insisted on riding along to the hospital.
“I wasn’t there when he was shot, and I remember thinking there was no way I was leaving his side again,” Harris said.
Aaron’s parents weren’t allowed to see him in the emergency room until several hours later. Melissa Aaron vividly recalls those first words he said to her: “Mom, I stepped in front of Ashanti.”
“I couldn’t be mad, because that’s the kind of person that he is, Melissa Aaron said. “He’s a defender. He looked out for us. He looked out for his sisters. That’s just him. He didn’t play defensive line for no reason.”
Anne Arundel County police continue to seek leads to find the shooters, offering a reward up to $10,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
A fighter
In the early hours of New Year’s Day, Melissa and her husband, Larry Aaron Jr., could only muster the strength for four phone calls to immediate family.
Yet, within hours, the waiting rooms at the hospital were filled with friends, family and various members of the community. Melissa Aaron estimated more than 100 people came that first day, and there were dozens more that reached out via text and social media.
Aaron was alive, but the prognosis was grim. News came that doctors were unable to operate.
“Because he still had his upper strength, with the way the bullet was sitting on a nerve, they were worried that removing it might lead to him being paralyzed even further,” Melissa Aaron said. “So they told us they were leaving it in there. I think that’s when it all started to sink in.”
Aaron said he let himself be angry for a day or two and then replaced that emotion with determination.
“That’s the thing about Larry, he’s always been a fighter, man,” Harris said. “No way he was going to just sit there and feel sorry for himself.”
At the beginning of each week, Aaron was given a checklist. The tasks — aimed at establishing self-sufficiency — ranged from operating a wheelchair to feeding and dressing himself. The ultimate goal, according to Aaron, was going home.
On Jan. 9, he was transferred to the University of Maryland Rehabilitation & Orthopaedic Institute. Almost exactly one month later, on Feb. 8, several weeks ahead of the initial schedule, he was released.
“That was a good day,” Aaron said. “I had realized pretty quickly there was no point in getting mad no more. Setting goals and staying positive was the only thing I could really control.”
A gentle giant
The walls in the basement of Melissa and Larry Aaron Jr.’s Columbia home are covered in old sports photos, the majority chronicling the athletic journey of their son that began before he even reached kindergarten.
“When he was born, it was already [decided] he was playing baseball, he was playing football,” Larry Aaron Jr. said. “I was one of those dads who made his son play [sports].”
The posed sports cards, dating to when he was 5 and suiting up for the Dragons in the Columbia Youth Baseball Association, offer a glimpse of a baby-faced Aaron. But it’s the accompanying team photos that are the most striking.
In every photo, even the earliest ones, he literally stands out from the crowd.
Packed into that outsize exterior was a vibrant personality.
“He was a class clown since elementary school … definitely a jokester,” Larry Aaron Jr. said. “He was a gentle giant.”
It was a natural athleticism, inherited from his parents, that aided him in making the varsity football squad at Oakland Mills as a freshman and immediately contributing on the offensive line at left tackle.
But that initial high school season also had more than its share of stumbling blocks.
Oakland Mills lost every game in 2012 and Aaron, late in the season against Mount Hebron, suffered a serious right knee injury that threatened to end his football career before it really started.
“[The doctor] said he would probably have a limp for the rest of his life, and forget about a scholarship going anywhere,” his father recalled. “No university was going to invest that much money on a knee as bad as L’s knee was. Me, Melissa and L were in the doctor’s office crying. In my mind, I’m saying to myself, ‘There is no way this boy is not playing no sports.
“If he could walk, he was going to play.”
Aaron worked tirelessly to prove the diagnosis wrong, eventually returning to play sports after a lengthy recovery. He needed a hefty brace, but it rarely slowed him down. He made the varsity basketball team as a sophomore and rejoined the football team as a junior.
Despite the positive strides physically, with his knee growing strong enough to play baseball the spring of his sophomore year, Aaron maintained he was done with football.
Harris said he and the rest of their close group of friends nagged him every day to reconsider.
“We needed him, but more than anything, I think we just all wanted him out there with us,” Harris said. “For me, that’s my blood without blood. My brother.”
Aaron eventually relented and before long
That success on the football field carried right over to the basketball court that winter, with Aaron and football first-team all-county teammates Harris and Tre Hopkins serving as key pieces on
Aaron was one of the first players off the bench that season as a junior, but his contributions as a teammate were arguably just as important.
“Larry understood the importance of the camaraderie,” Jon Browne said. “That group was as thick as thieves, as we like to say, and it really was a great locker room, and I’ve said it before in terms of Larry’s significance and role in that. He was the ring leader of nonsense, and [I mean that] in a very positive light.”
As a senior on the football field,
For all the big plays Aaron made during his high school career, including scoring the game-winning touchdown as a senior against Reservoir after stripping the ball away from an opposing player, Tom Browne said it was something Aaron did off of the field that sticks with him to this day.
After a “devastating” loss to Walkersville in the first round of the 2015 playoffs — Aaron’s final high school game — Tom Browne received a text from his senior lineman that read, “Thank you for the experience to play for Oakland Mills again … if it wasn’t for you, then I would of never touched the field again. So thank you for all the pushing and talks we had, it really means a lot to me!! Love you coach, keep your head held high.”
“I took a screenshot of that and I blew it up and it sits on my desk to this day,” Tom Browne said. “It’s something that kind of brings a smile to my face and says, ‘This is why you do it man, for kids like this.’ ”
A matured man
On Feb. 3, 2016, during a ceremony in the Oakland Mills media center, Aaron officially made his decision to become a member of the Marshall football program. That July, he arrived on campus and was introduced to fellow “props” Jaquan Yulee and Tyler King.
That first year, the trio was officially listed as “academic nonqualifiers” but were allowed to work out, attend class and receive athletic assistance while trying to improve their academics to the qualifying standards laid out in Proposition 48.
Almost immediately, Yulee, King, Aaron and Jason Smith — a redshirt sophomore and former prop himself that had hosted Aaron on his initial recruiting visit — became inseparable.
“There was a bond there from day one. It felt like we had known each other all our lives,” Smith said. “I know for me, I had my own ‘big brother’ when I got to school in 2014 that looked out for me. So when those three got on campus, I made sure to do the exact same thing by taking them under my wing and showing them the ropes.”
By the end of the following spring, Aaron, King and Yulee had all completed the requirements to become eligible, and on July 27, 2017, they officially joined the team. The work, however, was just beginning.
Marshall defensive tackles coach J.C. Price said as much as Aaron had grown during his first 12 months in the program, the task ahead of him in year two was just as daunting.
“This was by far the hardest he had ever had to work in his life. So there’s naturally going to be an adjustment period each time you add something new to the equation,” Price said. “It was a growth process. But credit to him, he stuck with it, developed an appreciation for the hard work and became a matured man in a lot of ways.”
Aaron made his college debut in Marshall’s third game of the 2017 season, appearing late in a shutout victory against Kent State and assisting on his first tackle. Slowly, his playing time increased and so did his contributions.
By the time the season finale rolled around — against Colorado State in the New Mexico Bowl — Aaron was one of the team’s first defensive linemen off the bench.
“By the last two to three games, into our bowl game, Larry was playing as well as anyone we had. That really was incredible when you think about just a couple months earlier he was really only playing when the game was decided in a so-called mop-up role,” Price said. “To go from that, as a freshman, to being a regular in the rotation in that amount of time is extremely uncommon.”
A soldier
Yulee got the call his teammate had been shot around 9 a.m. on New Year’s Day. It had been two weeks since Marshall’s 31-28 bowl victory and 13 days since the last time he had seen Aaron.
He immediately got in a car with King and drove to Maryland. By nightfall, they were in Aaron’s hospital room, taking in a scene that Yulee said still chokes him up.
Yet, through the pain, Yulee saw Aaron’s strength.
Shortly after the visit, in a photo posted on Snapchat of Aaron smiling in his green No. 93 Marshall jersey, #93Strong was born.
“We were sitting around talking and I don’t remember how, but ‘93 Strong’ just came out and I was like, ‘You know, that’s perfect.’” Yulee said. “He’s a soldier. Almost any other guy who took a shot in the back like that, it would have been over. Not Larry. He was still holding strong.”
What started as a social media hashtag soon became a rallying cry. By mid-January, “93 Strong” was being put on bracelets and T-shirts to be sold as part of fundraising efforts for the Aaron family.
Aaron, who was still under hospital care,
“Personally, I had no idea [he was coming],” Coach Jon Browne said. “Hammond gets introduced, the lights go out, we lined up our starters … and then the place just goes bananas.”
Physical and occupational therapy were scheduled for early March at the University of Maryland Rehabilitation & Orthopaedic Institute. A new living space was being constructed in the basement of Aaron’s sister’s home.
Everything, as Melissa Aaron said on the afternoon of Feb. 15, was “progressing as well as we could hope for at this point.”
A little after 10 a.m. on Feb. 21, Aaron’s mother went into his room to help him get ready for a doctor’s appointment.
.
“I was getting his stuff ready to get him cleaned up and I turned, and I turned again, and he was like kind of seizuring, something that I had never seen before,” she said. “He was out for a good little while. … I had to call 911 and they took him to the [hospital].”
A CT scan revealed several blood clots — a large one in his leg and others in his lungs. Later that evening, Aaron went into cardiopulmonary arrest after the clots spread to other areas of his body.
“I remember hearing ‘Code Blue’ in his room … and he was gone,” Melissa Aaron said. “He was out for about an hour before they brought him back.”
As doctors prepped to insert vena cava filters in an effort to catch some of the blood clots, Aaron again went into cardiac arrest. And again, after some time, he was revived.
The damage, however, had been done. Doctors said Aaron’s kidneys were failing and he was brain dead.
“That was one of the hardest things ever, but I know L would not want to be in a state like that. And there was no way I was going to let a machine just keep him alive like that,” Larry Aaron Jr. said. “We needed L to be at peace. We were tired of him suffering … so we decided to turn the machines off.”
In those final minutes, doctors allowed everyone in the waiting room — family, teammates, friends and coaches — to gather around Aaron’s hospital bed and say their goodbyes together.
“Them last moments that we all took as a family, as brothers, as friends … it was something I will keep with me forever,” Yulee said. “I was right there next to him when they took the machines off of him and we just seen his eyes open one last time. Then he was gone.”
As much support as there was after the shooting in Severn, there was even more after Aaron died. At a
More than a dozen people, including his parents, got tattoos with variations of “93 Strong” and “DI4L” which stands for ‘Do it for Larry.’
King has done his best to honor his fallen teammate through action.
“More than anything, this whole thing made me realize to take nothing for granted. Because, for real, Lo should still be here with us right now,” King said. “And I do think in a way he is here. … I like to think he’s an angel looking over us now.”
For Melissa and Larry Aaron Jr., some days are better than others.
July 27 — what would have been Aaron’s 20th birthday — was one of the more difficult ones.
Surrounded by loved ones at a cookout at their home, the Aarons ate cake, released balloons and drew comfort from the realization that their son in his 19 years, had made such a lasting impression on others.
“It’s still hard and I don’t think that will ever go away,” Larry Aaron Jr. said. “But we are blessed, happy and proud … to hear the stories that we’ve heard about how respectful L was, how mild-mannered he was, how much people loved him and how much he loved life.
“That’s something that’s keeping us going.”
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