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Story by William Buchheit
Editor’s Note - The following article is the first in a three-part series chronicling Elke Kennedy and her son Sean’s untimely death.
PART 1 - THE CRIME
It was quarter ‘till four in the morning when Greenville’s Sean Kennedy offered to walk Audrey Riddle to her car. The date was May 16, 2007 and Brews Afterwork Bar on Pelham Road near I-85 had seen a busy evening. A gay man who had just turned 20 in April, Kennedy was not a regular patron of Brews. But it was College Night, and tons of locals on summer break had flocked there to cash in on it.
With Riddle (not her real name) safely to her car, Kennedy said goodbye and began walking away. Seconds later, a car pulled up beside him and out jolted a husky young man with shaved head and angry brown eyes. 18-year-old Stephen Andrew Moller dashed out of the car and through the predawn darkness at Kennedy. Earlier that night inside the bar, the 5’11, 190-pound teen had exchanged cell phone numbers with Riddle and, since that time, fostered a seething disdain for her openly homosexual friend.
Moller’s face was the last Kennedy would ever see, a homophobic obscenity was the final word he would ever hear. Moller hurled his fist into Kennedy’s face, crushing his cheekbone and sending the 20 year old spiraling towards the asphalt. Kennedy’s skull hit the pavement so hard that his brain stem was severed from his brain.
As Moller jumped back into the car and fled the scene, Riddle dashed out of her vehicle towards her unconscious friend. Sitting on her knees cradling Kennedy’s battered and bleeding head, she begged someone to call an ambulance. Surrounded by intoxicated chaos, music and darkness, however, those who heard her cries thought Sean was merely drunk, and Riddle later claimed that a full 15 minutes elapsed before an ambulance arrived.
Around 4:30 am, Elke Kennedy’s phone rang. Less than six hours earlier, her son had been at home on the phone with Dell customer service, working on the laptop he’d bought the day before. Shortly after 11:00 he’d told his mother goodbye and headed out for a night on the town. He had picked up a female friend and headed over to The Castle, a well-known gay bar off of Pleasantburg near Greenville Tech. There, they’d rounded up some friends and headed off to Brews, just three miles down Pelham from where Kennedy lived with his mother and stepfather Jim.
The woman on the phone identified herself with the Greenville Hospital System and asked Elke if she was Kennedy’s mother.
“They wouldn’t tell me if he was okay or if he was not okay,” she remembers. “They just said I needed to hurry up and get there.”
A neurologist met Elke and Jim at the hospital moments later with the worst news a parent can hear - their son’s injuries were non-survivable. Six hours after his mother had last seen him, Sean Kennedy was comatose and on life-support in the Intensive Care Unit.
•••••
As her son’s final hours beeped away, his friends flocked to his side in a spontaneous vigil.
“We had 40-60 kids with us all day long,” Elke recalls. “We had pretty much the whole ICU taken over. . . . Some young people stayed in the hospital room for 15 hours. They were unbelievable.”
Also unbelievable were the tales the youngsters told of Kennedy’s impact on their lives.
“They would tell me all these stories about what Sean had done for them, and how Sean was always there for them, and how they couldn’t live without Sean,” Elke says. “I found out so much about my son that I didn’t know that was just amazing,”
That’s saying a lot for a woman who spent so much time with her son during his two decades on earth. The youngest of three children born to Elke and her first husband, John, Kennedy spent his first seven years in Charleston. His parents moved to Greenville in 1994, when he was 7 and divorced three years later. Elke married John in 2000, right as Sean was entering adolescence.
“He had a lot of energy and personality,” she remembers. “He loved music always. He loved to dance and was always on the go. I could never get mad at him because he had this contagious smile . . .”
He also had an ear for music. Not only did Kennedy play sax and drums in the J.L. Mann marching band, his mother claims he could pick up just about any instrument and be playing it successfully within the hour. Though he never got into trouble in school, Elke says he was only an average student, preferring to spend his free time with his music and friends instead of his books.
He also worked part-time as a waiter at Sticky Fingers and Joe’s Crab Shack, which enabled him to meet new people.
“He had many friends,” says Elke. “During his high school years, there was probably not a day when I came home or woke up in the morning that there were not people sleeping on the living room floor, sometimes ten kids at one time. He would tell me that those kids were his friends. I found out afterwards that most of them were people he had just met. They had no place to sleep, but because their parents threw them out, he brought them here.”
The German-born Elke knew her son was gay years before he approached her with the news at age 17.
“He actually did it in a letter he slipped under my door,” she recalls. “He said, ‘Mom, if you don’t want to love me anymore, I will understand.’ I told him that there is nothing that he could ever do for me to stop loving him.”
At approximately 6:30 p.m., a little over 14 hours after he’d arrived unconscious in the ER, a brain wave test conducted on Kennedy showed no brain activity. He was pronounced dead at 11:20 p.m., exactly 24-hours after he’d headed out of his mother’s home and into the night for the final time.
The 20-year-old remained on life support until early Friday morning so that his organs could be donated.
•••••
That Thursday, Moller turned himself in to police, but incriminating evidence had already made its way into the hands of investigators. After arriving with Kennedy Wednesday morning in the ambulance, Riddle had left the hospital to retrieve her car and change out of her bloodied clothes. She returned to Brews, where she found her cell phone in her car with new voice messages.
Three of them were from Moller, taunting her with obscenities and bragging profanely about his attack on Kennedy.
In less than a minute of talking, the teen used the “f” word a dozen times and twice called Kennedy a derogatory name for homosexual.
The third and final message was the most disturbing of the lot.
“Tell your (expletive) friend he owes me $500 for breaking my (expletive) hand on his teeth,” it said.
Part II of this series will examine the controversial aftermath of Kennedy’s death, as it has played out in SC’s legal and political systems.
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