Friend remembers black coach slain by white nationalist

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - It's been 20 years, and Shawn Parrish still doesn't understand. How could someone kill Ricky Byrdsong?

"He was a great man," Parrish said. "You don't really think about knowing someone who gets murdered."

It was 4:30 in the morning on July 2, 1999 when Parrish was awakened by a phone call. It was the wife of Jamal Meeks, who had served with Parrish as an assistant coach on Byrdsong's Northwestern basketball coaching staff. Coach Byrd had been shot, she said.

Parrish lived within 15 minutes of the Byrdsong family in Skokie, Illinois, He turned on the TV and searched for news. Unable to find anything, he called the local NBC affiliate and asked for any information they had.

Byrdsong had died a few hours earlier, the man at the TV station said.

Parrish, who now lives in Fishers, didn't know what to do, but he knew where he needed to be. He got in the car and drove to the Byrdsongs' home.

Byrdsong had been jogging in his neighborhood with his two children, Sabrina and Ricky Jr., when Benjamin Nathaniel Smith pulled his vehicle alongside Byrdsong and shot him in front of his children.

Smith was part of the white nationalist Creativity Movement, led by Matthew Hale, which proclaimed the superiority and creativity of whites. In a weekend Midwest killing spree, Smith also fatally shot Won-Joon Yoon, a Korean student at Indiana University, and wounded six Orthodox Jews, three African-American men and a Taiwanese man.

Smith fatally shot himself as he was pursued by police.

Smith didn't single out Byrdsong because of a personal vendetta. He singled him out because of the color of his skin.

"Ricky was never a target. This kid had been on a shooting spree and saw an African-American and shot him," Parrish said. "Where Ricky lived, he lived in a nice neighborhood. Even to find his house was tricky. Why that guy was on that road is beyond me. I have no idea."

Byrdsong's murder gained national media attention in large part because of his time spent at the men's basketball coach at Northwestern. He was hired in 1994 and was the first African-American coach in program history. In his first season, he took the team to the NIT. It was just the team's second postseason trip. The early success wasn't sustained, and he was fired after the 1997 season.

Byrdsong kept Parrish on as an assistant as a holdover from a previous coaching staff.

"Ricky was an unbelievable man to me," the Owen Valley and Ball State graduate said. "He really didn't see color at all. He promoted me when it would've been easier to promote someone else. He was a loyal person."

Byrdsong was always known to help others. He frequently visited Cabrini-Green, one of the most notorious housing projects in Chicago. He would run basketball camps for underprivileged kids.

Everyone had a Ricky Byrdsong story. During a job interview/Parrish had years ago, Byrdsong was brought up by an owner of a steel company. The owner told Parrish that his well-off brother had taken his son to a Byrdsong basketball camp. The owner's nephew arrived without basketball shoes. So Byrdsong took him to the mall and bought him a pair.

"He was always doing something for everybody," Parrish said.

Byrdsong's funeral was a "who's who" of basketball coaches and players. Byrdsong's pallbearers were his former assistants: Parrish, Meeks, and Paul Swanson, as well as Steve Kerr, B.J. Armstrong and Scott Perry.

The community was unsettled, angry and confused. White supremacy wasn't frequently talked about.

"It really wasn't something that was a topic of conversation," Parrish said. "It wasn't like you talked about white supremacists. It's different without social media. It wasn't in your face all the time. As the investigation progressed, we found (Smith) was part of this white supremacist church in Indiana.

"That was 20 years ago and you thought hate crimes were settling down. It seems weird that it's continuing on."

Parrish rang the doorbell early in the morning at the Byrdsong residence. He was let in, and after a period of grieving with Byrdsong's widow Sherialyn and the family, began making phone calls to those who needed to know about the coach's death. Many were people in Byrdsong's basketball circle. He took plenty of phone calls, too.

"People would call," he said. "They didn't know what to say, but they would just call. It affected a lot of people. It changed who you were. It was such a surreal moment that there's someone (murdered) who I worked with and who I'd been with two days before."

Parrish had been gone from coaching for some time, and Byrdsong's death persuaded him that other things were more important. After he was fired from Northwestern, Parrish had taken a year away from coaching. During that time, his oldest daughter Lauryn was born.

"After that happened, I saw, 'Wow. Life is short and precious.' I decided I want to make sure I was around for my family," Parrish said. "I saw a lot of coaching friends that didn't get to spend time with their own kids. At that point, Lauryn was six months old when Byrd was killed. I can't imagine not being here for her. It changed my whole perspective on life. I saw the impact he had on his family and the impact he was going to have his family when he wasn't around."

Parrish has had multiple opportunities to get back into coaching , but he has declined. Instead, he attended Lauryn's swim meets and coached his younger daughter Sydney - an Oregon commit and a senior at Hamilton Southeastern - in basketball.

And he still thinks about Byrdsong, and asks a lot of questions. Why? Why did it happen then, and why is it still happening today?

"I just don't understand why anyone would have hatred for someone based on their skin color," Parrish said. "We've become numb to it. Am I more sensitive to it because I went through it with him? Yeah. He didn't think that way. If there's someone committing a hate crime, the assailant doesn't know how those people feel. Ricky loved everybody. (Smith) just killed someone because of the color of his skin.

"I just hate when I see how warped people can become."

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Source: The Indianapolis Star

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Information from: The Indianapolis Star, http://www.indystar.com