A teen was tragically gunned down. Now his heart lives on, binding these KC families
On a fall Friday night, 63-year-old Gary Dixon walked up the grandstands of a high school football stadium for the first time in more than a decade. The marching band played a school fight song. The student section echoed verses of a chant.
For much of the night, his eyes didn’t leave the tall, well-built wide receiver in a Raytown Bluejays uniform, senior Desmond Hutson. The two couldn’t be much less alike, Dixon a middle-aged white man on the verge of retirement, Hutson a black teenager with the world in front of him and a football scholarship to Iowa.
Dixon isn’t a coach or a scout, nor is he much of a talent evaluator. Truth be told, he isn’t even a sports fan. But he returned the following Friday to watch Hutson. And then the next. He became a fixture in the crowd, mostly keeping to himself, his presence prompting occasional curiosity.
“Excuse me, sir?,” a school administrator asked one evening. “Do you mind me asking what you’re doing here?”
It’s a long story, he would explain, though the T-shirt he wore to games offered a clue. A message was plastered across the front.
The generosity of a stranger can heal a broken heart.
Shattered world
Christopher Hutson Jr. wanted to be the star athlete in the family, but by his early teenage years, he had relinquished that title to younger brother Desmond.
Many will tell you that he and Desmond acted like twins. Watched the same TV shows and movies. Had the same circle of friends. Heck, even when Chris kissed a girl for the first time, Desmond kissed her next. They laughed about that for years.
But sports were their bond. When the game passed him by, Chris put his energy into Desmond’s athletic career. Told his mom that Desmond was going to make him rich some day, and he believed it.
“My brother, with sports, he knew before I even knew that I was gonna be something different,” Desmond says.
Two years ago, as Desmond prepared for a summer basketball game, Chris was driving through Kansas City with his girlfriend, lost and checking his phone for directions. While stopped at an intersection, a man shouted at him, “Learn to (expletive) drive,” according to his girlfriend. After pulling side by side, the man fired a gun through the window and drove away.
A bullet pierced Chris between the eyes.
By the time his family — father Chris Sr., mother Carthesa, younger brothers Desmond and Jaiden — rushed to the hospital, nurses warned that Chris would be unresponsive.
Desmond was the last to arrive. He thought of his older brother as the commander-in-chief. When he walked into the room and saw Chris immobile, he leaned over the bed and said, “Bro, if you come out of this, I’ll treat you like the man. I’ll make sure you’re the biggest brother.” Desmond swears he felt Chris squeeze his hand.
When her sons were toddlers, Carthesa would run her pointer finger along the base of their feet. It became a long-running joke with Chris, who would reply, “Come on, Mama, you got cold hands.” She would laugh. He would, too, an infectious Scooby-Doo laugh that could overtake a room. As her hand touched his skin in the hospital bed, Carthesa is certain she saw Chris twitch.
But it was too late. They knew. With her family alongside her, Carthesa moved near her eldest son’s ear.
“If you can stay, stay,” she said. “But if you gotta go, let go.”
His organs failed within half an hour.
At 1 p.m. on May 26, 2017, Christopher Hutson Jr. was gone. He was 19.
Running out of time
Gary Dixon could hardly breathe by the time he walked through the doors of Saint Luke’s Hospital. He couldn’t muster the words to describe the pain in his chest. His face had turned pale white.
A nurse wheeled him to the emergency room and promptly called one of his daughters. “I think you better come down here,” the nurse said.
Dixon’s heart was failing. Doctors surgically installed a balloon pump in his chest, but it would buy him only a couple of weeks.
He needed a new heart.
Saint Luke’s elevated Dixon to its most severe transplant list. They provided no timetable for how long he might be waiting. They provided no timetable for how long he could afford to be waiting.
All he knew, he said, was that “I’m getting out of the hospital one of two ways. Either with a new heart or ....”
He discussed power of attorney options with his three kids, all of whom are in their 30s. He listed the items he wanted each of them to keep in case this was it. “Save your money,” he told them. “Just bury me in a box, and you guys have a party.”
Dixon and his wife divorced in 1997. He had lived as a single man for the better part of 20 years. Worked in technical support for a Lee’s Summit company that specializes in milkshakes. Spent his free time fixing old cars.
His kids had been his life. He was the type of father who put them above all else. He always emphasized establishing traditions. Birthdays are a big deal. And so his oldest daughter, 34-year-old Sarah Swenson, brought Oreos and milk to the hospital to celebrate hers.
“My dad was always a big, strong superhero. I didn’t think anything could hurt him,” Swenson says. “When you see Superman lying in a bed, and it’s touch and go, it was a shock to all of his kids.”
The pump left Dixon stationary in a hospital bed for more than a week. He couldn’t move.
The days were long, frustrating and most of all nerve-racking. In time, he developed a motto to calm his anxiety.
One day closer.
“That was my way of trying to stay positive,” he says. “One day closer to getting a new heart.”
Dixon had lived with cardiomyopathy since 1999. Ten years later, he had a defibrillator installed. Life carried on.
But late in 2016, fatigue took over. A trip to the mailbox was unbearable. He was put on a watch list for cardiac replacement, albeit a less urgent list. The trip to the hospital, initially a checkup, moved his name up the list.
He’d lived a good life, he thought. He told his three kids he was proud of who they had become. He prepared for whatever outcome awaited him.
And then one afternoon, a group of nurses walked into his room. The next four words have stuck in his memory.
You have a donor.
At 1 p.m. on May 26, 2017, Dixon learned of the heart that would save his life. He was 61.
The first meeting
One Saturday afternoon last summer, more than a year after Chris died, Dixon and his three kids parked in front of the Hutsons’ house. They sat quietly inside the truck before Dixon reached for the passenger door handle.
“Dad, you don’t seem nervous,” his daughter said, breaking the silence.
“I’m taking Chris home to see his family,” he replied. “Why would I be nervous?”
They were crying by the time Dixon pushed his index finger into the doorbell. No answer, and so he rang it again.
Chris Sr. opened the door.
He didn’t speak.
He took a step forward, wrapped his arms around Dixon and gripped tightly. They stood there for a minute or perhaps longer, the arms of a black father squeezing the midsection of a white man 20 years his elder, Chris’ heart lodged in the middle.
For a year, the Hutsons had kept alive the memory of their oldest son, often by sharing stories of his influence when he was alive. Standing on the doorstep, here it was in plain sight: The influence remained after death.
Chris had signed up to be an organ donor just four months before he died and just two days before Dixon added his name to the transplant list for the first time. Chris told his mom he wanted to help other people, and fewer statements have better fit his personality, she says.
Unlike his brother Desmond, whose vivacious manner makes him one of the most popular kids at Raytown High, Chris was shy, more cautious than adventurous. That made the events preceding his death all the more shocking.
By all accounts, Chris had an affection for all living things. He once cried when he saw a homeless man at a stoplight, so his mom turned around and gave the man $20. A beaver used to roam the backyard, and Chris quietly started to feed it every night. It took days before his family realized what he’d been doing. After Chris died, the beaver walked closer and closer to the house each night. “He finally just came all the way up to the porch, like, ‘Dude, where’s Chris?’” Carthesa says.
Seven people benefited from Chris’ gift of life. Lungs, kidneys, skin grafts. But there’s a special meaning behind the organ that resides in Dixon.
“His heart was the best part of him,” Carthesa says. “He was the most loving person you could meet.”
Dixon had talked with the Hutsons for more than a year before finally meeting, which is standard protocol with the Midwest Transplant Network. Initially, he sent a letter. “I hope to learn more about the person who is my constant companion and can pay tribute to their life and eternal gift to me,” he wrote. The Hutson family left the letter unopened for months. It was too soon.
At the time of Chris’ death, he worked with his mom at a financial company. He also took courses at Metropolitan Community College’s Longview campus. One day, while sitting at work, Carthesa felt a nudge, as if Chris insisted she open Dixon’s note.
When she got home that evening, Carthesa and her husband walked into the bedroom, closed the door and peeled open the envelope.
“We read it, and then we literally sat at the foot of our bed on the floor, and we cried for an hour,” Carthesa said. “It was overwhelming. I was so happy, but then in the same breath, I was just so, so sad.”
Dixon introduced himself as a father of three, an Independence, Mo., man in his 60s. Along with the letter, he included a picture of himself in a hospital gown shortly after surgery, his children by his side.
The transplant match was based on a variety of factors, most notably blood type. On the surface, the two appeared quite different. They were 42 years apart. Chris was a thin young man, the spitting image of his father. And most noticeably, they were from different races. Candidly, the Hutsons had envisioned the organs helping people more like Chris.
And then they met Dixon.
“I knew when I met Gary that Chris was right where he belongs,” Desmond says. “To see he’s helping someone as sweet-hearted and kind as Gary, it touched me because that’s exactly the type of person my brother was.”
Dixon brought a stethoscope with him to the first meeting. He lifted up his shirt, revealing the scars on his chest. Desmond, Jaiden and Carthesa took turns listening to the heart beat.
“I’m still here,” Carthesa says she heard that day. “I’m with you.”
A funny thing happened after Dixon received the transplant. His personality changed. The kids say he was always a bit rougher around the edges. Even by his own admission, he had a temper.
But he has calmed. He has become more apt to show signs of warmth. He makes a point to appreciate the smaller things life has to offer.
“It’s like a little piece of Chris is with him,” Swenson, his daughter, says. “He has a much kinder heart.”
‘I appreciate you’
Dear, Mama,
I want to thank you for everything you have done for me. I thank God every day for you and Daddy. I thank you for forgiving me every time I mess up in life and being there every time I fall and you telling me, ‘It’s OK, Chris, you got it; just try a little harder.’ Mama, I appreciate everything you do for me in life, and one day when I’m older and you’re older, I’ll give everything back and a little more.
Happy birthday from your handsomest son,
Christopher Hutson Jr.
Before tipoff at a Raytown High basketball game this month, Desmond turned to the stands, glancing toward a spot where Chris once sat. He saw his mother and smiled and nodded his head. He saw his father. His younger brother.
And he saw the resting place for his brother’s heart.
Dixon has missed only a couple of football and basketball games in this, Desmond’s senior season. He sits with the Hutson family.
“I can’t take the place of their brother,” Dixon says. “But it feels like this is where I should be. It’s a face in the crowd they know isn’t their brother, but it’s just a piece of him there.”
In the final home game of his basketball career this week, Hutson stood at the free-throw line with Raytown trailing by two points and fewer than five seconds remaining. As he prepared to shoot, opposing fans banging their feet on the stands to distract him, Hutson spoke to himself with every dribble. “This is for you. This is for you,” he repeated.
Swish.
Swish.
Hutson turned back toward his family, pressed a finger against his lips and pointed it toward the sky. He clutched the tattoo on his arm, a picture of his brother approaching stairs to heaven. “My brother’s keeper,” it reads. Raytown would win in overtime, clinching a conference championship.
Desmond contends that Chris would have followed him to Iowa. He’d probably already have a job lined up there, he says. Dixon has begun shopping for Iowa Hawkeyes gear. Tickets to the games, he says, are a must.
Initially, Desmond stopped going to football practice after Chris died. His father told him he could quit if it was too difficult. Summer workouts started at 7 a.m. daily, and Desmond lay awake in his bed past 5.
“I had a lot of stuff on my mind. ‘What should I do next? How am I gonna do this next?’” Desmond says.
A jury found John C. Young, then 46, guilty of involuntary manslaughter for the shooting that left Chris dead. Young is serving a 24-year sentence. Every member of the Hutson family spoke at the sentencing.
They moved a few months after Chris died. They couldn’t stand being in that house without him.
But he still has his own room in their new home. As a family, they painted the walls red, Chris’ favorite color. They laid out his favorite outfit. His Bible. His Xbox. A couple strands of his braided hair. The letter he wrote to his mom. And when they finished, they walked out together and closed the door behind them.
It would remain shut for a year.
There are reminders of Chris elsewhere throughout the house — pictures on the walls and shelves in the living room. If you press the heart of a stuffed teddy bear on the mantle, you hear a recording of Chris’ unique laugh.
But mostly, his memory lives on in the people he left behind. In the man he saved.
“I don’t wanna stop sports — because this is what he sees me doing and how he sees my life going,” Desmond says. “I wanna be able to continue to pursue that and make it and make him proud. I think if I wasn’t going to be who I’m supposed to be, it would let him down.”
Moving forward
Dixon tells his kids about Desmond’s games, even if he’s still learning the nuances of sports. His co-workers, friends and neighbors can tell you whether Raytown won last week’s basketball game. They know the name of the team’s star athlete.
Dixon visits the Hutsons’ home every so often, and he’s had them over for dinner, too. He always carries his stethoscope with him. Sometimes Carthesa will ask to listen. They’ve talked about having a big family get-together. Aunts and uncles. Nieces and nephews. The whole thing.
He and Carthesa wear matching bracelets that remind them of their connection. He texts or emails her almost every day, often when he sees something on Facebook or an item in the news that he thinks she might be interested in. “It’s amazing, because it’s always something Chris would have liked,” she says.
She often will grab her phone to text Chris. And then she remembers.
Waking up is the hardest part. She was a high school teenager when she had Chris. Her morning routine for nearly 20 years started with a trip into his room. But she has a new way of “getting out of bed and putting two feet on the floor every morning,” as she puts it.
One day closer.
Dixon used the motto as optimism that a donor would come. For Carthesa, it’s a reminder of a different sort.
One day closer to meeting her son again.
This story was originally published February 24, 2019 at 5:30 AM.