Editor’s note: This story is part of a series about American teenagers killed by firearms this year, a leading cause of death among children in the United States. Read more about the project here.
CNN –
They had never really had a solid tuba player.
The legendary New Orleans musical family of course had its trumpeters and trombonists, saxophonists and drummers. But the tuba – namely the circular type called a sousaphone – is large. And it takes a lot of air. And it scares little children. And it’s not exactly cool.
Still, even as a shy young teenager, Revell Andrews recognized the need for a stable foundation of the instrument in the brass band arrangements that his relatives play virtually every day in the streets and clubs of their city and around the world.
“For Revell, it was more like, ‘If this is a need in the family, I’ve heard it a few times, let me pick up the tuba,'” recalls his loving cousin, drummer Derrick Tabb.
“And it happened to be the instrument that everyone needed.”
There’s something else about the tuba, though, Tabb said: “You immediately notice the difference between having one there and not having one there.”
And now, amazingly, they don’t.
Courtesy of Katy Reckdahl
Revell Andrews
Not since Revell, 18, was fatally shot while driving an SUV on a Monday afternoon in June, just weeks after graduating from McDonogh 35 Senior High School.
He was with a few close friends – a tight-knit group who shared a group text message and checked on each other’s phone location – and picked everyone up from their summer jobs, said Katy Reckdahl, the mother of another boy in the group, who hosted Revell in their house when his father, who was a trombonist, was on tour.
Read more profiles of children who died from gunshots
Three of the children stopped in Reckdahl’s Jeep at a gas station downstream from the French Quarter, she said. According to a police report, they pulled out around 2:45 p.m., and a 14-year-old allegedly got out in a vehicle behind them, a New Orleans homicide detective testified last month about the man arrested in the case, citing witness testimony from surveillance footage, reported CNN affiliate WDSU. CNN has reached out to the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.
The underage driver then allegedly rolled down the window of his car and fired, the investigator said. Revell was shot in the face and died shortly after in a hospital, police and his family said – another American teenager killed in a country where guns remain a leading cause of death for teenagers, federal data show.
Revell was less than a year old when Hurricane Katrina devastated most of New Orleans and moved to Mississippi with his parents and siblings, said his father, Revert “Peanut” Andrews. When Andrews returned to the Louisiana music scene, Revell would visit his home district of the 6th Ward and go to performances and second-tier street parades with his father, the musician said, noting, “Everyone called him my twin.”
When Revell’s father returned to high school, he had spoken to his son about the violence that lurked in its corners: “He might go to the store,” the father said, “but he would never hang out there – because he knew.” Revell – on the sousaphone, the bell like a halo above his head – even helped lay out the track for a YouTube video in which another cousin, famed trombonist and singer Glen David Andrews, pushes for awareness about violence intones the following:
Stop the killing in New Orleans…
7th district, 6th district, 8th district
Stop killing.
More about Revell Andrews
“Our little group was not naive to the city and its ominous levels of gun violence,” Reckdahl, a local journalist, wrote in a tribute to Revell in the city’s daily newspaper. “The intention was for them to stay home and out of the way. They wanted more in life. But at the most basic level, they wanted to live.”
Andrews didn’t mind his son’s hours of video games because he knew it kept Revell, his girlfriend and her friends safe in the house. He also knew that his boy would excel in school – perhaps even on his way to college and his marching band. And he couldn’t say enough about the instrument Revell wanted to learn.
“We never had a sousaphone player,” Andrews said. As for a favorite song, Revell tried to “learn them all.”
“I know there were no limits for him,” he later said.
Andrews and others also knew that Revell – the second youngest of four brothers – was not a follower, they said.
“That was one of the first things that impressed me about Revell,” said Tabb, who runs the Roots of Music program, which helps hundreds of at-risk children each year. “Most young musicians these days…plug it in and start playing straight away; He went to other people’s gigs…and waited to be invited.
In fact, Revell was mature, modest, calm – “an old man in a young man’s body,” Reckdahl wrote.
“I’ve never seen Revell, never seen him angry, never seen him get loud and fight nobody. I can’t remember a single time,” Andrews said, amazed at how he met such a violent end. But either way, “What, are you going to keep her inside forever?”
Courtesy of Katy Reckdahl
Revell Andrews’ friends at his gravesite.
In the weeks after his death, Revell’s father collected acceptance letters by mail from colleges that didn’t know their offers would no longer be of use, he said. In Revell’s room, Andrews found a pair of his son’s sneakers – Jordan 1s – and slipped one toe into them.
“It fits perfectly,” he said of the 10 1/2s. “I didn’t even know his foot had gotten to that size.”
Now he keeps her. And to wear them. And to anyone who asks: “These are my son’s shoes.”
Andrews will also keep the letters, he said, along with so many of Revell’s photos and videos that his cousins and friends had shared of the happy moments of a young life, which Tabb described not so much as “lost” but as ” a recording”.
Revell smiles shyly. And wraps his arms around his crew. And dances in the street. And breaks the foundation for a series of eternal music.