Remembering Riley
Thank you to Sarah Delia at WFAE for talking with Riley’s family for this NPR Morning Edition story.
FROM WFAE —- Thursday marks one year since a gunman opened fire on a UNC Charlotte building during the last day of spring semester classes. Two students died that day — Riley Howell and Reed Parlier — and four others were injured. We heard from the Parlier family Wednesday. Now, we turn to the Howells as they continue to grieve 21-year-old Riley, who is credited with tackling the gunman a year ago.
Since Riley Howell died last year, his family has tried to pick up where he left off, by completing a list of goals he had set out to do. A big one is to fix up an old car Riley had bought with the intention of restoring it.
"You can really feel him when you’re sitting in his car," said Riley's mother, Natalie Henry-Howell. "He had bought an old Isuzu Rodeo he was working on, and purposely bought it in bad shape so he could learn about cars and engines.
"When you have a child that dies and you look at this big, beautiful life ahead of them that it’s just gone, part of what you try to do is walk in the ways they were walking. Everything is unfinished in their life and there is never going to be any closure. But finding small things, I think, helps you make it minute to minute sometimes."
Riley’s father, Thomas Howell, says he feels near his son when he gardens or goes to the gym where Riley used to work out. There were landscaping projects they were going to do together, Thomas says, that had to be done without Riley.
"It was a matter of coming to the realization we're not going to see him again, I guess moving forward from that, taking in the things he liked and his hobbies, what he enjoyed," Thomas said.