CHARLESTON, W. Va. — Family and friends gathered at Stonewall Jackson Middle School on Charleston’s West End Monday night to remember the life of Tahj Claiborne.
“When people were down, he would like come cheer us up,” Antoinaya, a classmate said. “He was real funny.”
Claiborne, an eighth grader at Stonewall Jackson, was traveling with his uncle, aunt, cousin and two others to Wheeling for the Super Six football championship Saturday morning. On I-77 near Ripley, the driver lost control of the car, went through the median and into the path of an oncoming truck. The driver of the oncoming southbound vehicle and one passenger in the SUV were the only survivors.
“A lot of our students didn’t know until this morning when they got to school,” Henrietta Moore, an English teacher at Stonewall Jackson Middle who had Claiborne in sixth and eighth grade said.
The school gave students an outlet to deal with their grief and fondly remember Claiborne.
“We let them write, make posters, make sympathy cards for the mother and just write their greatest memories of Tajh,” Moore said. “That’s what we did for them today, it was very important.”
The principal also helped organize the candlelight vigil Monday night, letting people know when and where it was taking place.
Students, teachers and other members of the community gathered in front of the school as several people spoke and many shared their memories of Claiborne.
“He had such a love of reading, he loved to read,” Moore said. “He was actually one of our highest [Scholastic Reading Inventory] scores that we had in the eighth grade this year.”
As for his classmates, they will remember him as someone full of joy who was always sharing it.
“I was having a bad day, in my class I couldn’t get the work, so I got upset. He came up there and was like, he just did this funny voice he always do,” Antoinaya said. “He just cheered me up a lot.”
Claiborne’s cousin that was in the wreck, Devon Easton Badger, was a student at South Charleston High School. A candlelight vigil for him will take place Wednesday.