NELSONVILLE — Jordan Brown was a student. A brother. A son. And he was so much more. Brown loved life and brought sunshine into every room he stepped into. He was a young man who found himself at Tri-County Career Center and High School, both figuratively and literally.
Brown entered the Powerline program at Tri-County as a junior from Alexander, and, according to his mother, Jenny Seymour, he blossomed at the career center.
He was filled with passion and loved powerline. His dream was clear to him, he would move into the mountains and work in powerline. Brown loved powerline to the point that he would constantly drone on and on in the car about powerline specificalities with his mother, a conversation she would sometimes tune out.
“It’s literally the only thing we ever talk about… We were on 50, between Albany and Chillicothe, and I don’t know what they are, but they’re huge metal power poles, and we were talking. He would tell me all about it and how that was the type of thing he wanted to do…” said Seymour, gently cradling a heart-shaped locket with a picture of Jordan. “I know nothing about power lines but I know now that there are different phases and different reasons things are set the way they are. He always talked about it.”
On Oct. 27, 2021, Brown died in a car accident at 18 years old.
After graduating from Tri-County, Brown scored a job with the tree trimming service, Jaflo Inc. It was his first step towards achieving his powerline dream.
Early in the morning on Oct. 13, while on his way to work, Brown crossed four lanes and crashed into a tree.
Seymour’s phone rang. She didn’t answer though until she saw a familiar number from a family member. She called the missed numbers back until she reached a state highway patrolman who informed her of her son’s accident.
“My grandchildren’s mom called me and told me that Jordan was missing. He never showed up for work. I hung up with her, and I went to my mom’s office to start calling back the phone numbers that called me that day…” said Seymour. “It was earth-shattering. I felt bad that I wasn’t there, that it took so long for someone to get ahold of me… The one thing I remember the most is just wishing my mom would drive faster.”
Brown was transported to Genesis Hospital in Zanesville but was later taken to Grant Medical Center where he spent the final two weeks of his life.
During his stay at Grant, the Coronavirus was still prominent in the United States; the result of which was single-person visits. For two weeks, Seymour woke up at 6:30 a.m., at a hotel just down the street, and would go stay beside her son as he fought for his life until the doctors would force her to leave at night.
“It was a roller coaster. Some days were good, others were bad. But the bad days were bad … Watching my child lay there, and you can’t fix it, and all you can do is hope someone else can. It was the worst feeling in the world,” she said.
At the start of his visit, doctors expected Brown to make a full recovery but it was later found that he had a ruptured heart valve, an injury Seymour isn’t sure happened during or after the accident.
Seymour was forced to make decisions that no mother should ever have to make, much less make alone, but she did. Before he died, doctors allowed Brown’s family to enter the room and say their goodbyes one last time, and then, he was gone.
“I think he just got tired, you can only fight so much,” said Seymour, pausing to take a moment to collect herself. “I don’t know for sure what caused the accident. I don’t know if he fell asleep. I don’t know if something else happened … He had a heart valve rupture, but no one could tell me if it happened prior to the accident.”
The following year was a blur for Seymour as she tried to accept that Brown was gone, but she wasn’t alone. Every so often, his friends would drop by to check on her; kids that she considered to be her bonus children from how much they were together. Along with the support she received, Seymour wanted to find a way to keep Brown’s name alive and after months of thought and string-pulling, she decided the best way to do this was to look where he was most passionate.
“I asked myself, what can I do to keep his name alive? What can I do that will have an impact for something that he loved? I questioned it. Do I do something for 4-H? The school? Do I just do something in general for people in that field?” said Seymour. “But after talking to some people, Tri-County was it. This is where he found himself. This is where he came and fit in. It’s where he could be the person he wanted to be. He found what he loved, and what he wanted to do. It was an obvious choice. It was here.”
On Monday, Oct. 2, Seymour walked into Tri-County with a check and promptly paid off the fees for the juniors of the Powerline Technology program.
According to the Tri-County website, the powerline fees run up to $86 dollars per student, and the junior powerline program has 15 students.
“(Brown) was a great kid and doing this keeps his name alive… These fees can be a burden for many of these kids after all,” said Danny Sulivan, the Powerline Technologies instructor.
But there were other ways people kept Brown’s name alive, one such was the creation of a logo featuring the silhouette of a deer, the mountains he so dearly loved, and his name spliced over in large bold letters. The design was printed on t-shirts and shared with family and friends.
Seymour plans to continue paying the fees of the junior powerline program each year as a scholarship with the help of her friends, family, and sympathetic strangers as they work to ensure that Brown’s name will never be forgotten.
The Jordan Lee Brown Memorial Scholarship Fund page was created on Facebook and hosts various fundraisers to continue the fund.
If someone finds themselves at Tri-County amongst the students and faculty, whether or not they knew Brown, or if they were affected by his mother’s kindness, students can still be seen walking through the halls with a Jordan Brown t-shirt, or driving down the road with a Jordan Brown sticker on their back windshield as they leave school for the day.
Brown may be gone, but he will never be forgotten.
After all, Jordan Brown is Tri-County. And he would be proud.
Demetrius Newlun is a student journalist with Tri-County Career Center and High School’s New Media+ program. This article originally appeared on The 360, a publication of the New Media+ program at Tri-County Career Center.
