Chester County school, friends mourn teen killed in Tuesday crash

Ask any of the 360 or so students and teachers at Lewisville High School about Cory Abernathy and they’ll probably say they not only knew him but can share a funny story or act of kindness by the teen that left an impression on them.

Abernathy, 17, was killed late Tuesday after his pickup crashed into a tree on Gaston Farm Road, authorities have said. Officials say weather may have been a factor in the crash. Funeral arrangements have not been announced.

The Lewisville senior, who lived in Edgemoor, apparently had taken a friend to pick up a car and was on his way home from work in Rock Hill when he crashed.

Abernathy was known for such acts of kindness to friends and strangers, and the only thing bigger than his hugs was his heart, friends and teachers recalled Wednesday.

“He was a son that you would want your own son to be like,” Principal Jim Knox said. “He was a young man that you’d like your son to hang out with because you knew he’d be in good company.”

Demorrious Robinson, a member of the school’s IT staff, called Abernathy “a bridger.”

“He’s someone that doesn’t just hang out with a certain crowd, a certain ethnicity or a certain race,” Robinson said. “Around this great campus, you’ll see countless people, their eyes are red from crying no matter what their ethnicity or skin color is. That’s the type of person Cory was.”

Abernathy was known throughout the school for his passion for welding and excelled in classes at the Chester County Career Center. Robinson recalled how Abernathy would stop by on his way in from the career center and show him pictures of items he made for other people.

“He would be so quick to pull out his phone and say, ‘Let me show you what I did,’” he said. “It was never anything for him; it was always something he did for someone else.”

Friends and classmates of Abernathy wrote letters to his family , some of which Assistant Principal Tammy Snipes read Wednesday.

“To describe Cory, you think of trucks, hunting, a camo jacket, bootleg jeans and mud,” one student wrote.

One student said she wasn’t friends with Abernathy but remembered him stopping to offer her a ride while she was on the way to McDonald’s. Another wrote that she was in line at Zaxby’s once and didn’t have enough money to pay for her meal. “He gave her a dollar and then sat down and ate lunch with her,” Snipes said.

Snipes herself recalled Abernathy returning from the career center late one day, and he explained that he had stopped to help someone whose car was broken down.

“He burned his hand and had to get assistance from us in the office, but he had stopped to help those folks fix their tire,” she said. “That’s the kind of kid Cory Abernathy was.”

Knox said Abernathy was also passionate about his love for his country. He was part of a group known at Lewisville as the “Back Land Boys,” because they parked their pickups on the back row of the school parking lot with American flags flying from the backs.

That same group of students is expected to park their trucks near the front of the school Thursday, with their American flags flying in Abernathy’s memory.

Knox said student-led gestures like that, Wednesday night’s candlelight vigil and T-shirts made by the senior class to honor Abernathy are testaments to the love students have for him and the impact he had on their lives. Knox and Snipes visited Wednesday with Abernathy’s parents, and his mother shared one of the teen’s last loving acts.

“She did have the opportunity to speak with him on the phone last night, when he called and said, ‘I’m on my way home,’” Knox said. “That again says something about who a young man is – he called his momma.”

This story was originally published December 2, 2015 at 7:43 PM with the headline "Chester County school, friends mourn teen killed in Tuesday crash."