'I want to play through him. I've got to accomplish his dreams, too'

Published Dec. 21, 2015 3:54 a.m. ET

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Sam Gardner

It was just after 10 p.m. Thursday when Zenobia Dobson heard what sounded like nearby gunshots in her Knoxville, Tenn., neighborhood of Lonsdale. She was on the phone with her mother when the noise rang out like firecrackers in the night.

The sound made her pause long enough to fear the worst.

A few minutes later, Dobson watched in horror as emergency vehicles screamed past her apartment, and immediately her worried mind turned to her sons, 17-year-old Zack and 15-year-old Zaevion, both football players at nearby Fulton High School.

Sometimes, a mother just knows.

"When I heard the ambulance, I stopped doing what I was doing," Dobson told FOX Sports by phone Sunday evening. "Then someone knocked on my door, and when I got that knock, I automatically knew that it was one of my kids. I didn't know which one, but I knew that it had something to do with me."

A concerned neighbor confirmed Dobson's fears, and on instincts and adrenaline alone, Dobson headed blindly in the direction of whatever had happened around the corner from her apartment, about four miles northwest of the University of Tennessee.

"I stormed out the door, and I said, 'God, whatever it is, fix it. Fix it, God, just fix it,'" Dobson said, "When I arrived on the scene they had the house blocked off. I told them I was Zaevion's mother, but they wouldn't let me go past the yellow tape.

"I know what yellow tape means, and it's never good."

On the other side, Dobson's son Zaevion, the baby of the family, was dead, shot in an seemingly arbitrary attack at a gathering he'd been at with some friends. Thursday was the last day of school before Christmas break for most students in the area, and they were celebrating the holidays and the start of a couple weeks off.

Zaevion died a hero, using his body to shield three female friends from the gunfire. Zack was there too. He escaped unharmed -- Zaevion was the only person at the party hit -- but he never got a chance to say goodbye to his little brother and best friend.

"When I heard the gunshots, I ran," Zack Dobson told FOX Sports. "I hurdled over a fence and I stayed there. Then I came back to the front door -- we were on the back porch -- and when they let me in, they were like, 'Your brother is gone. Your brother is dead.'

"I went back there and I held him in my arms," Zack Dobson continued, his voice quivering. "I was shaking him, telling him to wake up, that I needed him. But he was dead, it was bloody. So I just sat him back down and ran to my cousin's house."

Outside, Zack's mother, heartbroken and inconsolable, looked to the heavens for guidance.

"It was devastating," Zenobia Dobson said. "Just devastating. I didn't have any sense of direction. I felt like I was lost. I felt like I was drowning and I couldn't get out. I had to ask God to give me strength because I was weak.

"This was my child and I didn't have answers to the questions I was asking."

*****

The hours that followed Zaevion Dobson's murder were a blur, as numerous friends and family members visited the Dobson home to offer sympathy and support and do what little they could to calm a distraught Zenobia.

Among them were Fulton head football coach Rob Black and running backs and special teams coach Jay Humphrey. They stayed and comforted the grief-stricken family until after 2 a.m., about the time police caught up with the alleged suspects in the case. (One of them, Brandon Perry, was killed when he, too, was shot and crashed the BMW he was driving.)

"It was a scene that I don't care if I ever, ever see again, because one person shouldn't have that much hurt on them," said Humphrey, a longtime coach at Fulton and a friend of the Dobsons. "I still feel it today as we speak about it. I told my wife when I got back home, I said, 'Baby, that was a nightmare.' It was a nightmare that I was actually in and a part of. It was almost like something that you see on TV, but it was real."

The following day, Black organized a meeting at the school for players and coaches to mourn the loss of Dobson, who was more to his teammates than just a sophomore inside linebacker.

"You could see the heartbreak and the tears and the sadness in their eyes over the fact that Zaevion was gone," said Jason Harbison, the Falcons' co-defensive coordinator, a coach who has worked closely with both Dobson brothers -- Zack plays cornerback -- since they arrived at Fulton.

"Football is a game that teaches you so much about life, and then you turn around and this is one of the things that you're not ever really used to doing," he continued. "You don't have a game plan for this situation, so you sit down and say, 'Guys, we're here for you, we love you, we're here to share with you and we're here to listen.'"

That afternoon, virtually everyone in the room reflected on Dobson's life and shared, through welling eyes, their memories of No. 24.

"It was a time to sit down and to cry," Harbison said. "Football is a sport that everybody wants to be tough in, but sometimes you've got to let that hurt out and start the process of grieving."

Eventually, many of the players made their way over to Dobson's locker. During the season, a gathering of players could often be found huddled around it, so it seemed like the most natural place to be

"He always had something funny to say, whether it's cracking jokes or making up a nickname for somebody," Black said of Dobson. "That's kind of who he was, and people flocked to him. He was one of those natural-born leaders."

The meeting brought temporary solace, but many players still left the school wondering how they are going to cope when they return to campus in January without Zaevion Dobson around.

"When you look at 15-, 16-, 17-year-old kids, mentally and spiritually, they're probably not prepared for something like this," Black said. "It's not something that they expect to have to deal with, and then in a snap of a finger it's real. So a lot of them are having a hard time with that. Our guys are broken."

Zaevion Dobson

*****

Shortly after Black got home early Friday, he received a text from Zack Dobson. Zack wanted to know if, next season, he could switch from No. 4 to No. 24 to honor his brother.

"I just wanted to do it for him," Zack Dobson said Sunday. "Everything I do in football from now on is for him. I want to play through him. I've got to accomplish his dreams, too."

Among those dreams was to someday play in college for either Oregon or Alabama. (Zaevion was never a fan of the hometown Vols.) Naturally, Zack, a junior, also has dreams of someday taking the field for the Ducks or the Crimson Tide.

For the Dobsons, doing things together was usually the only option.

"They went to the same school, they played on the same team, they sleep in the same room," Zenobia Dobson said. "When they go shopping, they get the same thing in different colors. If it was Zaevion's birthday, he would act like it was also Zack's birthday. 'If you're going to buy me something, you've got to buy Zack something, too.' He was just that type of child."

Zack said he and Zaevion planned to attend a few football camps this summer with the hope of putting themselves on the radar at their dream schools.

"He'd tell me to ball out because if they give me the offer, they have to offer my brother," Zack Dobson said. "That's what we kept saying, and we'd push each other every day to try to succeed. And he told me he was going to pick my school from the offers I got."

Some might consider that goal unrealistic, but Zaevion always seemed to have a knack for defying expectations.

"He was one of those that you'd describe as a blue-collar type player," Black said. "He didn't necessarily have all the talent in the world, but what talent he had was because he worked so hard. And those kids are fun to coach, when you can look at them and say, 'This guy's got great heart. He's got a whatever-it-takes approach.'"

Dobson was no different at home, either. For as long as anyone can remember, Zaevion has said he wanted to someday be a football coach, and he spent as much time as he could learning the intricacies of the game.

"When he was little, he wrote playbooks, and he still has his own playbook," Zenobia Dobson said. "He would come home and get on his iPad and watch plays. He would watch all his plays from Friday night's game, watch everything on tape. He really was a student of the game. It wasn't just about him going out on the field. He knew the ins and the outs about the game of football."

A perennial power, Fulton won Tennessee state championships in each of the last three seasons before losing in the second round of the playoffs this year. Before Dobson's death, it went without saying that the mission for next season was to get back to the top, but in the wake of his passing, that objective is as clear as ever.

"I think our guys are going to rally behind him, and it's going to be a motivation," Harbison said. "No. 24 was very important on our team. He was a person who was working on his own already for next year, and that's an inspiration that guys have seen, and they're going to take it and use that to inspire them to be stronger, bigger, faster and play harder every game, every play."

"Next year, we know we have to do things with a purpose," Zack Dobson added. "We're going to push ourselves even harder to go win states again, because that's what he wanted."

The Dobson brothers

*****

For all the questions that still linger about Dobson's murder -- many of which may never be answered -- there's little doubt about why this brave young man put himself in harm's way to potentially save others.

Anyone who knew Zaevion well would tell you that's the type of kid he was.

"If you're honest with yourself, a lot of us would think twice about whether we would do that," said Jihad El-Amin, a local middle school teacher and a tutor to both Dobson brothers for the last three years. "Most of us, it's just in our nature as a human being to protect ourselves, but instantly, he thought about the people he was with, and to me, that's what men should do.

"He loved his brother, loved his mother to death, and when you went into that house, you understood that there was love there," El-Amin continued. "Their mother loves them and was dedicated to them, and he'd started to mature in a way where he understood that and wouldn't hesitate in reciprocating that. And what he did and the sacrifice he made was a reflection of that."

Zenobia Dobson described El-Amin as a mentor to her late son, but if you ask El-Amin, he'll tell you that he admired Zaevion as much as Zaevion looked up to him.

"When you pick up a seed, you say that it's a seed, but in reality, it's a tree, which has more seeds, which are more trees. So really when you pick up a seed, you really pick up a forest," El-Amin explained. "And when you meet an individual like Zaevion, you think that you're meeting a kid, and he's saying he wants to be a football player and do this and that, but in reality, he was always a hero that we just never saw.

"We're seeing it now, but that was always in him -- that care, that love, that ability to be willing to sacrifice for someone else. All that was in him, and when the time came for him to stand up and be what it was that he was made to be, he didn't hesitate."

Shortly after Trayvon Martin's shooting death in Florida in 2012, El-Amin started a boys' group in the Knoxville area, which regularly met to talk about their respective lives and keep each other motivated and accountable, one of several organizations, including 100 Black Men, that Dobson was a member of. El-Amin said Zaevion was one of the most influential members in his group, and in the days since his death, others in the circle have drawn inspiration from his actions.

"Even some of the older guys came to the house and were saying, 'This made me re-evaluate me being a man,'" El-Amin said. "It's like, 'Yes I have my family and I take care of my family and I do what I'm supposed to do, but I can do more than that.' He was willing, without any hesitation, to be what we're all trying to be."

Unfortunately, none of that will bring Zaevion back to his forlorn mother and brother, but Zenobia admits there's some comfort in knowing that her son's death wasn't in vain.

"That made me feel like I did my job as a mother raising my son," Dobson said. "We talked about things like that, and (El-Amin) used to always tell me, 'You're doing a great job. You think your sons aren't listening, but they hear you.' So when I heard that, I just felt relieved to know that my son stepped up.

"Me being his mother was a gift and a blessing from above," she added. "It was a gift from God. He sent me a gift, and it was only for a short period of time, but I appreciate the years that I had with my child."

You can follow Sam Gardner on Twitter or email him at samgardnerfox@gmail.com.

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