Just 43 days after the Sacred Heart Class of 2019 threw its mortarboards into the air to celebrate the end of their secondary education, on Sunday night it mourned the loss of its first classmate, celebrating his young life at a candlelight vigil on the Crusader football field
Carson Hall, 17, died of accidental drowning while celebrating one final high school fling with friends aboard the Lady Monroe on Saturday just west of Ship Island off the Mississippi Gulf Coast. About 20 seniors were aboard the yacht for a dual birthday party for a member of the class and a final senior party. They were being teenagers having a good time.
On Sunday evening, the yard lines of Sacred Heart’s football field were lined with white luminaries from end zone to end zone as family, classmates, parents, friends, coaches, teachers, city officials and others remembered this young man with both tears and laughter.
As the crowd gathered, Tate Thriffiley, a parent of a 2018 Sacred Heart graduate, made his way around to Hall’s friends seeking suggestions for a playlist of Hall’s favorite songs, which was then played over the speaker system. It included some Trace Atkins, John Denver, XXXtencion, Bad Baby, Chief Keef, and the song of the Class of 2019, In Color, by Jamey Johnson. When it played, classmates sang along.
And if it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just trying to save each other
You should’ve seen it in color.
Hall’s sisters, Jillian, wearing her brother’s Crusader football sweatshirt, and Julia, who proudly showed friends the photos she had picked out for her brother’s tribute table, were in attendance. She explained how her favorite number was 13, because that was Carson’s football number.
One of Hall’s former teachers, who lined the fence like many, noted that he wasn’t particularly fond of school.
“He didn’t like school in general,” she laughed amid tears. “He was always full of it, but was always respectful to me. He specifically invited me to go to mass with him before the soccer tournament and asked me to go to the game. At the end of mass he thanked me for coming.”
It was hard for many to speak and organize their thoughts. But they all seemed to share that one common thread about their friend Carson – he enjoyed life and wanted others to do the same.
Kathryn Slaughter, a 2019 graduate, referred to Carson as “the life of the party.”
“He was just someone who always made you feel better and brought your spirit up,” she said. “He always wanted you to have fun and didn’t want you to sit around and sulk. He wanted you to get up and live life and I think that’s what we’ll remember most about Carson.”
Lexie Saffle and her sister, Emily, grew up in the same neighborhood with Carson, the Pipkin kids and other Sacred Heart student. Emily graduated alongside him.
“His smile would just light up the room,” said Lexie, who had been friends with Carson since pre-K. “In pictures he hated smiling with his teeth, but if you got him to smile with his teeth in any other situation, he just had the brightest smile on his face. It just made everyone else happy and he loved to entertain everyone else. He loved to make other people laugh, and he always had a smile on his face.”
And even though it’s a sad time, she said she doesn’t have one sad memory of Carson.
“They are all happy memories. He was always having fun and was the life of the party. He went with a smile on his face. And even when you hated him you loved him. We used to bicker like siblings. We grew up with each other. I’ve basically lived with him so many summers. It was either his house or my house. We’d build different forts and we were always playing outside.”
Friends surrounding her prompted her to tell the bean bag story.
She said it was her biggest memory of Carson and included Jill, JuJu and Emily.
“We spent the night with them,” she started. “We busted open Jill’s bean bag chair and strew the beans all over their upstairs and then we cut open Carson’s and we made snow angels.”
They had a blast until about 2 a.m. when Carson’s mom, Katrina, came upstairs and noticed what they had done.
“She lost it,” Lexie explained. “We had to vacuum it all up. I think to this day there are white Styrofoam beads all in that house.
“He always made everyone around him happy.”
Another friend said she thought you could label Carson as the class clown and most definitely everybody’s favorite person.
“As a sport guy, he took sports so not serious,” she said. “He was super nonchalant about it, but would freak out at the same time. But once he got serious, he was the most supportive person.”
Another friend said she was sure Carson could see them all crying at that moment. “He’s laughing because he’s so mad,” she said. “I bet he’s saying, ‘You guys are such losers; stop crying.’ You realize he’s laughing at us right now.”
At work and play
Carson was spending the summer working with Brian Saffle at Signs First.
“I had to call him and make sure he would show up for work every day,” he laughed. “It’s amazing what 24 hours will do. It truly makes you cherish the time we have here and I know that as a 17-year-old boy the last thing you are thinking is there is no tomorrow.”
He described Carson as a magnet.
“He was just a cool kid, who grown adults liked hanging out with. I’m a grown man and I enjoyed sitting down and having a very decent conversation with Carson Hall. I loved him. He was my son that I never had. He was my daughters’ brother.”
Saffle echoed his daughter’s sentiments about the neighborhood explaining that Carson and his sisters and other neighborhood kids were just back and forth. He remembers Carson as a youngster heading off to school wearing a backpack that was half his size.
“It was just a true community,” he explained. “It’s what you want your kids to grow up in. We just had that environment. The parents knew the parents, then the kids knew the parents and we watched out for these kids, like they were mine. It’s just a tragedy. It’s so so tragic. It could have been any one of those kids. We could be here right now today for any one of those kids who were on that boat.
“All we can do is listen. We’ve all had experiences at our age. This is their first and sad at this age. The sad part was that we were having all of these graduation parties and at one of the parties last week one of the parents mentioned that ‘we did our job, we got these kids through high school and no one died, nobody got hurt, and for this to happen on their last party, it sucks.”
Saffle described the class as a very close-knit group. “You messed with one of them, you messed with all of them,” he said. “That why I send my kids to Sacred Heart, for that experience. You can’t put a price tag on that. Just look right now. This is half the school gathered in just a matter of a couple of hours.”
Saffle said he grew up on the Coast.
“I was down there last night. I’ve looked down across the water a thousand times and I will never ever be able to look at it again without thinking of Carson Hall.
“I had told him you need to grab this summer because this is the last summer these guys will have without any responsibility. I told him this will be the best three months of your life and I hope you have a blast.
“We’ve lost a son, a brother; those kids lost a brother yesterday.”
FRIENDS
Football Coach Ed Smith, who addressed the crowd, asked them to look around at the large number gathered on the football field.
“Look around at the number of people here,” he said. “That’s a tribute to the impact Carson made, the lives he touched. If we live to be 80 years and touch half of this many people, then you’ve lived a good life.”
Country roads, take me home….to the place I belong, West Virginia, Mountain Mama, take me home, country roads.
A group of guys agreed that Carson could walk into any room and make everyone laugh.
“You really couldn’t peg Carson,” one said. “He’d be acting up with the teachers and they’d be hugging by the end of class.”
“Carson knew how to send it,” another said. “Let that be known, Carson knew how to send it.”
A question about liking school elicited big laughs. “He’d probably rather not go, but he made it better for everyone else. It was a bummer day when Carson wasn’t there.”
They referred to Carson as “a cool kid, a legend, who had superpowers. Jesus walked across water; Carson could walk across fire.”
Garrett Crowder played football with Carson for two years, explaining that Carson didn’t have the size, but he was a player.
“And he had the heart,” he said. “He didn’t want you to know it, but he did. He’d tackle anybody he saw. He’d do whatever he wanted. He was just a great guy. I love him so much. I just wish everyone got the chance to meet him, the chance to know him like we knew him. What a great guy he was and how much he helped. I mean he was the one guy who could get me so mad, so mad, and then the next sentence have me laughing. He knew how to work me and play with my emotions. He just livened up the group and kept us all going. He kept everybody laughing and on their toes, always on their toes.”
Crowder said Carson’s motto was ‘do what it takes to get it done.’ He wanted everybody to enjoy life and laugh as they went along.”
But some believe Carson has already sent them a sign that he’s OK and wants them to be also.
“On Saturday, when we came up from the bottom of the boat there was the most beautiful sunset Carson had for us,” Lexie Saffle said. “The dolphins were jumping really close to the boat and having a good time. That was Carson. And there was a rainbow in Hattiesburg. That was Carson telling us everything was going to be OK.”
