Won’t He Do It! Shaquille O’Neal Covers Funeral Expenses for Teen Who Accidentally Shot Himself

shaq-trade-basketball-dd4ba0cf6ea6387d

Shaq played a savior of sorts this Easter holiday.

Lord knows the family of Malachi Hemphill needed one.

After learning their 13-year-old son accidently shot himself while handling a loaded gun during a livestream Instagram video.

shaq15n-1-web

WXIA reported that his friends watching the video had warned Malachi to put the safety on the gun, and it went off as he proceeded to do so.

“I heard a big boom,” his mother Shaniqua Stephens told the outlet. “I just knew that it was something that was wrong.”

Malachi was found by his mother and sister.

The Atlanta-based teen died Wednesday at Grady Memorial Hospital.

Thursday evening Shaquille O’Neal visited the family to give his condolences and offer to pay for the funeral.

“We just broke down and started crying because Malachi didn’t have any insurance,” Shantirea Bankston, Malachi’s godmother, said.

“We weren’t prepared to bury him this young. We didn’t have insurance for him. So to have that from Shaquille O’Neal it was a blessing and very touching, and we appreciate everything he do for the community.”

 Shaquille O’Neal released a statement saying he was willing to help to ease some of the family’s unimaginable pain.
“No mother should have to go through this,” he said. “I can only imagine the pain that she and all of Malachi’s family must be feeling.”
Hopefully, no other mother will have too. We’ll be praying for you, fam.

 

 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s