Kefas Koudaya, an eighth-grader at Shady Grove Middle School, asked his father if he could go play ball.
It was Dec. 30, one of the last days of winter break, and three days before Kefas’s 14th birthday.
His father said sure, Kefas could go play basketball with friends at Johnson’s Park, across the street from their home in Gaithersburg. But, he said, Kefas had to read first. Kefas had been excited to tell his father, just days before, that he had made the honor roll with a 3.4 GPA.
Maybe 30 minutes after he left, there were sirens, and a knock at the door.
Kefas had collapsed on the basketball court, succumbing to what authorities believe was an undetected heart condition.
Montgomery County requires health screenings for student-athletes like Kefas, who was on the school’s basketball team, but it’s the kind of thing doctors don’t find unless they’re looking for it, and don’t look for without reason.
The Koudayas opened the door. They were shocked. And so were his friends, kids who would shuffle around his funeral on Saturday with mouths full of braces and shoulders incapable of filling suit jackets, some crying, some cracking jokes, but most stone-faced as they stared down loss for the first time in most of their lives.
“He’s just a really cool person,” said Kadesha Mitchell, 15, who attends Calvert High School and came to know Kefas through church. She remembered how the impossibly tall Kefas — at 5-foot-11, he was always the biggest kid — got everyone on their feet, dancing, at a church camp talent show.
Kefas collected sneakers — Jordans, Nikes, New Balances. His principal, Ed Owusu, once spotted him hobbling around campus. Kefas explained that he was keeping his toes flat to keep from creasing his new sneakers. He was a funny kid, Owusu said.
And he was a young man. Kefas had started dating a girl in the seventh grade. “I told him, don’t you know you’re not allowed to date until you’re 30?” said Kefas’ sister Myriam, a 17-year-old student at Magruder High School. But the girl broke up with Kefas, because he was too shy to talk to her in school.
As class resumed on Jan. 3, four grief counselors arrived at Shady Grove Middle School.
“This is our students’ first time dealing with death, the first child we’ve lost,” Owusu said.
On Jan. 2, classmates, friends, and school staff gathered at Jones Park to celebrate Kefas’s 14th birthday. They laughed and cried, and ate birthday cake. They sang “Happy Birthday” and “Amazing Grace.”
At the funeral, Kefas’s father, Amenyoglo, said his son had appeared to him with a message.
His father said Kefas wanted to tell his friends to keep going. He wanted to tell them that they have to study, and they have to finish their educations.
He wanted to tell them that they have to have great lives.
