Faith, kindness hallmarks of Chester County teen killed in wreck

It seems fitting that the night he lost his life in a car accident, Cory Abernathy was helping a friend.

Abernathy had just dropped off a friend when the Edgemoor teen and Lewisville High School senior, driving the pickup truck in which he took such pride on a rainy night of thick fog, hit a tree off a Chester County road.

Friends, family and an entire community who filled Catawba Baptist Church on Saturday for the 17-year-old’s funeral knew that was not an unusual act of kindness. One after another described an active church member, loving son and brother, and dedicated friend who would never hesitate to help someone else.

Allie Starnes said she will remember her friend’s positive attitude. “He was always checking up on me,” she said. “All the times we talked, it was never about himself. It was always ‘Are you OK?’ ‘Are you not OK?’ ‘Do you want to talk about it?’”

Starnes called Abernathy one of the “truck mates,” a group of friends known for their pickups and just as often the large American flags they fly from the truck beds – a line of them forming in the church parking lot the day he was buried.

“I’ve only known him for about a year, but it felt like six years, that’s how great a guy he was,” Starnes said.

Abernathy was eulogized as “country,” someone whose favorite color was camouflage and whose usual dress included a camo jacket, blue jeans and boots, most often covered in mud.

In a note read from the pulpit, mother Rhonda Abernathy said her son loved the outdoors so much “he would have slept outside every night if I’d let him.”

On Saturday, Abernathy’s friends, his family members and the ministerswore camouflage in his honor. Pastor Ron Richardson said he liked to dress casually most Sundays, but this was the first time he’d made this particular clothing choice to officiate a funeral.

Callie Pate, who grew up with the Abernathy kids, said she would remember a young man as outgoing as he was outdoorsy. “If you ever needed anything, you could always call Cory,” she said.

In the same note, Abernathy’s mother remembered a son who more than once gave a homeless man money and told him he’d pray for him – the same son who always gave both his parents a bear hug before he headed out the door, and texted his mom to let her know he was out the night of his fatal crash.

Now, Rhonda Abernathy wrote that she wouldn’t feel that hug again until “he meets me at heaven’s gate.”

Demorrious Robinson, a staffer at Lewisville High School, recalled the popular young man who wore his Christian faith on his sleeve.

“We saw Jesus every time we saw Cory,” Robinson said.

Cory’s father Jason gave a teary address about the pride his son took in the seasonal job he took to buy Christmas presents and, of course, get some work done on his truck, a job he was coming back from the day he died.

“Now he has a job working for the Lord,” Jason Abernathy said. “His plans for Cory were better than the ones I had.”

Pastors acknowledged the sudden loss of someone such as Cory can shake one’s faith. His youth minister Jeremy Dean compared it to the gospel story of the disciples crossing the sea with Jesus asleep on the boat when a sudden storm threatened to sink them. When life’s sudden storms come upon us, he mused, we ask what the disciples asked when they woke up Jesus; “don’t you care that we’re perishing?”

“I don’t understand,” Richardson told the funeral crowd, “but I choose to trust in God.”

Keith Smith, the church’s youth leader and longtime friend of the Abernathys, said he could see the effect of Cory’s life when he saw the large and diverse crowd that turned out for a candlelight vigil in his honor the night after the crash.

“It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen,” Smith said. “We live in a country where the Senate blames the president, the president blames Congress, Democrats point fingers at Republicans, black people and white people point fingers at each other. What would the country look like if we let those young people led us, pointing to the cross?”

Dean said he could see the reach of Cory’s life in the people who felt strongly enough to come to his final goodbye, whether they were wearing camo or not.

“Even today,” he said. “Cory is influencing lives.”

This story was originally published December 5, 2015 at 6:31 PM with the headline "Faith, kindness hallmarks of Chester County teen killed in wreck."