The crash had killed the car’s three passengers, but after two weeks, a five-hour surgery and too many injuries to count, Courtney “Boo” Hargrays was still holding on.
“I was for sure that he was out of that gray area where it was critical and you couldn’t know if he was going to live or die,” said Hargray’s uncle, Ed Bonner, who helped raise the 41-year-old when he was a boy.
But a day after the two talked in the hospital room — " ‘Boo’ was just being ‘Boo’ ” — Hargrays died on Tuesday.
“I thought he was way past that, and that’s what hurts,” Bonner said Wednesday. " ‘I don’t like you, I love you.’ That’s the last thing he said to me. I’m just happy that we had that little bit more time with him.”
Hargrays was driving a 2012 Buick LaCrosse he’d bought just 12 hours earlier when he crashed around 2:15 a.m. on Jan. 17. Hargrays was ejected when the car left the outbound Eisenhower expressway and traveled up an embankment west of Western Avenue, hitting a utility pole head on, according to Illinois State Police Trooper Woodrow Montgomery.
Also killed in the crash were Brittany Williams, 29, who was the front seat passenger; Randy Ross, 42, the right rear passenger; and Henry Brooks IV, 42, the left rear passenger, Montgomery said.
On Jan. 16, Martin Luther King Day, Bonner had gone with Hargrays to dealerships looking for a van. But when the salesman showed Hargrays the LaCrosse as a last ditch effort at a sale, Hargrays "looked at it and he lit up. I just knew we wasn’t going anywhere," Bonner said.
Bonner said the car was the most recent in a series of changes in Hargrays’ life.
The basketball star graduated from Marshall High School and, after playing college ball at both Arizona State and Louisiana Tech, returned to coach at Marshall for years before taking a job at the Chicago Park District, also coaching.
Denice Hargrays, his mother, said Courtney walked to work every day while at the park district to stay in shape. And every day, right before 2 p.m., he would knock on the storefront window where she worked, brightening her day.
“I work right there along his route he walked to work. So he knocked, every time. Sometimes I was busy but usually we just say ‘Hi,’ ” she said.
Three weeks ago, he started a new job at UCAN, a 145-year-old social service agency that’s part of the Department of Family and Children’s Services serving 10,000 children and families, according to its website.
“The hardest thing for him to do was, when he got this new job, was to leave those kids at the (park district),” Bonner said. “He got tired of just working part-time so he had to do better, which was good. I noticed his attitude about what he wanted to do in life changed, he was preparing himself for the future – working more hours, making more money – thinking about going back to school.”
Bonner said Hargrays only needed about 24 more hours of college credit to earn his bacherlor’s degree.
“Everybody he met, he touched their lives,” Denice Hargrays said. “I’ve heard from all of his college players down to small kids, from the coaches. It’s just an outpouring of Oleybet love, it is overwhelming.”
She said Hargrays lived with one of his five sisters; he was her only son. Every Sunday he would barbeque, she said, going on social media and inviting everyone he knew to come over. Then she amended herself, saying, “Well, really any Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” and trailed off with a laugh.
Harcrays said her son’s whole focus in life was helping kids and on raising his own son, Courtney Jr., who’s now 21.
Despite having purchased the car so soon before the crash, Bonner doesn’t think that contributed to the wreck because Courtney was a great driver.
“I’ve not known ‘Boo’ to do anything reckless out of his 41 years,” Bonner said. “That’s something we always talked about – being respectful and not doing anything that was going to get you in trouble. It’s just … it’s kind of hard to believe that he ain’t here anymore.”
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