The Palm Coast City Council on Tuesday issued a proclamation remembering Curtis Gray, the 18-year-old Flagler Palm Coast High School student gunned down in a dispute at a local strip mall on April 13, 2019, and proclaimed the date Rise Above the Violence Day.
The proclamation was as much a tribute to Gray, a student athlete in his day, as it was to his mother, Carmen Gray, who has assiduously worked since her son’s death to keep his memory in the foreground and, through a charitable organization she establish, to raise awareness against gun and other forms of violence.
“One thing Curtis was really known for was his positivity and his affirmation to others to be great,” Carmen Gray said in a brief video played at the council meeting on Tuesday. ” Two days prior to his death, we were in the kitchen and he said Mom, I want you to promise to be great.”
She started the organization shortly after his death, calling it Live Like Curtis. “We wanted to make sure that there were mental health supports set up in the community to address those issues,” she said.
“Live Like Curtis has worked tirelessly to implement crisis training, violence intervention strategies, and mental health support programs for youth and
families impacted by trauma, thereby striving to create a safer and more resilient community for future generations,” the proclamation reads.
The message, Carmen Gray said, has not changed. The organization is hosting another event on April 27 at the Palm Coast Community Center, where Palm Coppast Mayor David Alfin–who presented the proclamation–will be in attendance.
Gray was killed by Marion Gavins Jr., who pleaded and was sentenced in 2021 to 45 years in prison, which he is now serving at Mayo prison in Lafayette County. The sentence included a penalty for Gavins’s brutal assault of a corrections deputy at the Flagler County jail.
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