Grief WITHOUT Closure

Here’s an article about my friend who was murdered in March. (I’ve copied the text of the article below)

Grief WITHOUT closure

Mysterious death leaves a father searching for answers

David Simpson – Staff
Thursday, May 20, 2004

Above his eyes, O.B. Okon’s glasses perch on his forehead, making him look like the college professor he was. Beneath his eyes, traces of tears glisten in the creases of his skin, making him look like the grieving father he is.

“I’ve cried so much,” Okon said. He can talk about his loss now with only the slightest moistness on his 61-year-old face, but still he wonders how to reconcile himself to the hole in his life.

Okokon Bassey Okon III is gone at age 36. Why anyone would kill him is a mystery to his father, to an extended family stretching to Nigeria and to a network of up-and-coming high-tech entrepreneurs scattered across the country who counted the young man as a friend and trusted adviser.

“He was a kind soul,” said James Harris, a longtime friend and founder and CEO of the Web consulting business where Okon was working when he was killed March 28 or 29. “He really uplifted people, no matter what their circumstance.”

Harris’ firm, Elemental Interactive, created a memorial Web site — www.okokonokon.com — that has drawn numerous postings of letters and photos from Okon’s far-flung friends.

DeKalb County police have not come up with a motive or a suspect in Okon’s death, Officer Dale Davis said. His body was found March 29 behind the secluded office complex where he worked. He had been shot to death.

He apparently was attacked after locking the back door to the office building and starting toward his car. His laptop computer and books were strewn across the parking lot, his father said, but nothing was stolen.

Okon was working on Internet consulting projects out of the office of Elemental Interactive. The office building is on dead-end Zonolite Road, a short distance from Emory University.

Okon’s father and Harris are baffled as to how a robber would have picked the hard-to-find parking lot, especially on a Sunday night when the offices often were empty — except for compulsive workers like the younger Okon.

His father theorizes that someone who knew Okon tracked him there, but neither he nor Harris can think of any enemies Okon made.

Throughout his life, he was one of the people who brought together family, friends and colleagues. He was the last person they could have pictured in a confrontation.

The elder Okon was a professor at State University of New York and the University of North Carolina and then chairman of the computer science department at Morris Brown College until the early 1990s. He now works in the pay phone business.

From an early age, the younger Okon — nicknamed “O.B.” like his father — was “very constructive, always helpful,” his father said.

At age 3, he traveled with his father to Nigeria and embraced his extended family there. As a young man, he made the trip annually — even more often than his father.

He was born in Albany, N.Y. The family later moved to Stone Mountain, then Clarkston, then the Gwinnett side of Stone Mountain.

Okon graduated from Stone Mountain High School and Stanford University, where he formed tight bonds with a group of friends who called themselves the “Bruhs.”

He also got involved with the National Society of Black Engineers and ran into Harris at a workshop. Harris, then a Tennessee Tech student, had known Okon casually because both ran track in high school — Okon for Stone Mountain and Harris for Southwest DeKalb. Through their common interests in college, they became close friends.

After college, Okon took a job with Motorola in Chicago. Then he and two friends founded a firm that specialized in software training for airlines, including Delta and British Airways. The Sept. 11 attacks dried up airline consulting, the elder Okon said, so his son moved in with his father, now living in Ellenwood in Henry County, and collaborated with his old friend Harris at Elemental Interactive.

Okon lived with his father and his sister, 17-year-old Afiong, at the home in Henry County. On school days, he rose early to drive Afiong to her 7:30 a.m. SAT prep class at Stockbridge High School. So he made it a point to be home by 10 p.m. on school nights.

His father, who also sometimes works late hours, arrived home from Griffin at 3 a.m. that Monday, March 29, and was surprised his son wasn’t home. He assumed the younger Okon had forgotten to tell him about his plans, but grew more concerned when Afiong woke him early Monday morning to say she needed a ride to school because her brother wasn’t home.

In a morning of increasing anxiety, the elder Okon talked to Harris, who was traveling, and a long-distance friend of his son who had expected to hear from him that morning. They decided to call police. Okon headed to Elemental Interactive, where he found police swarming the parking lot.

Soon after, he got the bad news.

Friends packed a funeral here and a memorial service last weekend in Chicago, where Okon’s mother lives.

The elder Okon said he was pleased to see so many “very focused, very entrepreneurial young people from different parts of the country. That’s a consolation to me. . . . He touched so many people.”

Harris said the younger Okon was the first person he called when he decided to sell his business in 1999 — and the first person he called later when he decided to buy it back. He said a network of professionals around the country relied on Okon for his business and analytical skills and his kind counsel.

“He was the soul of the group,” Harris said. At the funeral, he said, he was struck to see powerful businesspeople “crying like babies and wondering if they can go on as a group.”

Okon’s father said, “It just seems unfair for him to be taken away so cruelly when he could do so much good.”

He stays in contact with police detectives and hopes public attention to the case will produce a lead.

“We can use any kind of help,” he said.

> DeKalb police are seeking information from the public in this case. To report anything that might help the investigation, call the Major Felony Unit at 404-294-2570.