Mizzou football’s No. 1 receiver has faced tragic loss. He overcame it with love
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kevin Coleman keeps his late brother’s photo necklace as daily source of strength.
- Family grief shaped his leadership, faith and commitment to community service.
- On-field rise at Mizzou fuels his Hall of Fame goal and plans for a Rashaad foundation.
Along with his winning smile and engaging way, the first impression you’re likely to get of Kevin Coleman Jr. radiates from the silver necklace he wears most every day.
The framed photo of his baby brother, Rashaad, prominently dangles inches down the front of his shirts. And it might as well be encased in amber for how it preserves memories and holds that time of his life precious.
Four-year-old Kevin had been such a “Mama’s boy,” his mother, Chinara Meeks, said, laughing, that she initially felt some guilt over being pregnant again.
But Kevin began loving Rashaad, she said, by rubbing her belly as he was on his way. By the time he arrived, Kevin instinctively assumed his role as the “loving protector.”
Next thing you know, Rashaad was on his feet and instantly active. Following her passion for pro wrestling, for instance, the three of them soon would play at it together. She’d typically pretend to be Dave Bautista, and the boys acted out the roles of Jeff and Matt Hardy.
“Of course, he didn’t know who they were, but I used to tell him,” Kevin said, smiling, in an interview with The Star.
Whether he remembers it all on his own or through stories passed down, Kevin thinks now of how smart and energetic Rashaad was. And of “the little set of bowling pins” they’d play with in their St. Louis-area home.
And how their play-tussles tended to end up.
“I let him beat me up,” he said, “because I just loved him so much.”
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That beautiful relationship, and the lives of all in the family, was shattered in October 2008.
With Chinara and Kevin in the car driven by Rashaad’s father, Richard Bobbitt, 18-month-old Rashaad was killed by one of 13 bullets fired at the red Ford sedan, police at the time told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
No one was ever arrested for the crime that somehow left everyone else in the car, including another son of Bobbitt’s, physically unscathed.
The emotional and psychological impact was another matter.
But what’s happening now in their lives is testimony to love and faith and resilience in the wake of such senseless tragedy.
And that’s part of Rashaad’s enduring legacy, embodied in the innocent image on Kevin’s necklace.
To Chinara, the gesture resonates, sometimes in joyful tears, as Kevin always having his brother on the journey with him.
To Kevin, it provides a vital feeling of connection.
“Every day I wake up, I just pray that God protects me and helps me have a great day,” he said. “And when I put that on, I feel like God and (Rashaad) are protecting me, making sure I’m just having a great day.
“Even when things are hard, I just think about them (and that) things will get better.”
Kevin Coleman Jr. found football early
In certain ways now, things could hardly be better for Chinara or Kevin.
As he has blossomed into the young man she hoped he’d be, and the fifth-leading receiver in the nation entering No. 14 Mizzou’s showdown with eighth-ranked Alabama on Saturday at Faurot Field, she has found her calling as a teacher and through advocacy.
“I can’t let this hurt cause me to be a hurting person,” she said in a phone interview. “So just with my faith in Jesus, I’ve got to give. So wherever I go in the world, I give.”
She tried to pour all that into Kevin, too. So she’s more thrilled by his personal growth than the highlights on the field — a development that reflects a vision he long had before finding himself at MU.
Not long after he was born, his mother and father, Kevin, told him they put a football in his hands. For that matter, family lore has it that he could catch a ball before he could walk. By elementary school, he was declaring his intentions to be an NFL or NBA player and told a teacher there was no “Plan B.”
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These days, he can actually picture life after playing football … but only after he becomes enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
“That’s what keeps me driven,” said Coleman, who leads the Southeastern Conference with 39 catches for 386 yards.
So does the idea of providing for his mother, who lives with lupus.
While she’s disabused him of the notion of not wanting her to work — because she wants to always be helping children — he wants to make sure she never has to worry about finances again.
“It’s always been a goal of mine,” he said, “to bring more happiness and more joy to her.”
Sharing love after tragedy
In the weeks and then months after Rashaad’s death, Chinara found solace in faith and family and through the counseling urged by her mother.
Grieving, she said, remains an ongoing process, but she’s also found her way forward.
“I’m a firm believer that God gives justice, and sometimes we don’t see it,” she said. “And God’s justice might not be the one that I want or how I feel. So I just focus on the positive and things that bring life.”
Naturally, she sought to help Kevin every way she could.
Part of that was through The Kids’ Clubhouse, which offers comprehensive bereavement services for families and specializes in children who have lost siblings, parents or other loved ones.
While parents went into separate rooms, she recalled, the children received therapy in age-appropriate groups and worked on crafts such as decorating pillows and making dreamcatchers.
They did that for a couple years while she moved several times trying to find better neighborhoods.
Every year at the start of school, she’d tell Kevin’s new teachers what had happened to him in case he was “having a moment.”
(During those years, Kevin also found peace through music. He learned to play the violin, the viola and trumpet, which he recently returned to as an escape. Sometimes, he sits in his car to listen to music of all types.)
Along the way, he matured and learned to be a leader instead of going along with others and making that an excuse. “‘It costs to be the boss,’” she’d tell him when he drifted. But it paid off, too.
Surrounded by family including nearby step-siblings, Kevin also had a way of embracing new friends:
As if they were brothers.
“Still to this day,” his mother said, “it’s like his brother’s love he gives to others.”
The road home to Missouri
He came to flourish at St. Mary’s High, where he led the Dragons to a MSHSAA Class 3 title in 2021 and amassed 179 receptions for 3,968 yards and 56 touchdowns in his career.
Missouri was the first school to offer him a scholarship, he said. But the coveted recruit wanted to get farther away because he “didn’t want to be available to certain people” and thought he would grow more at a distance.
For that matter, his mother didn’t immediately want him nearby, either.
Because of her fear of what happened to Rashaad, she said, “I kind of projected it onto him.”
So he was the kid who always had a curfew even when few others did, and he was the guy who’s mom always wanted him to bring his friends over and have them stay the night.
As much as she had agonized over keeping him close, she also figured his future started with getting away.
For a time, she actually feared him coming back from school because of what she called “horror stories” of young men going to college nearby and coming home and something bad happening.
So off the four-star recruit went to play for Deion Sanders at Jackson State in 2022.
When Sanders abruptly left for Colorado, Coleman transferred to Louisville and then Mississippi State without ever quite finding the right fit, even as he had 74 catches for 934 yards and six touchdowns in 2024.
But during Louisville’s bye week two years ago, he said not a lot of people know, he went to Mizzou’s homecoming game and started imagining what it would be like to be there after all.
After the Tigers won 39-20 at Mississippi State late last season, he spoke with a few guys on the field and got to thinking, “If I get the opportunity … why not make it happen?”
Especially since his future and his family’s is in Missouri, he reckoned, why not play and shake hands and make connections here? On Dec. 14, he committed to MU.
Trust in Drinkwitz and Mizzou — with a full heart
Still, Chinara was reluctant. His talk of going to MU “kind of brought those spirits” of worry back to her.
But she trusted in the reassurances she got from coach Eli Drinkwitz and his staff about how they would develop him not just as a player but as a person.
And keep him safe.
Now, she says, “every doubt, every fear” has been calmed.
“There’s no place like home,” she said. “They tell the truth, and it’s no false promises. …
“My heart is just so full.”
In great part because of how Kevin still carries Rashaad not only physically with the necklace but within.
Inspired by her role as an educator and his father’s as a youth football coach, Kevin actively seeks to be a role model in how he behaves. And he recently bought cleats and mouthpieces for all the kids on his father’s team because their families might not have the money.
However his future unfurls in football and beyond, he plans to create another mechanism for doing that more extensively: to help kids travel for youth sports and pay for college and understand the significance of character.
“One day I want to have a foundation,” he said, “and it’s going to be named after Rashaad.”
Another way he can keep taking him on his journey and keep honoring his name.
This story was originally published October 9, 2025 at 6:30 AM.