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player ready...Friday was going to be the biggest day in Ashanti McCall’s young life.
The date of her graduation from Roosevelt University had been set on her phone’s calendar for weeks. She meticulously planned for her commencement ceremony, debating whether to send back her gown after it arrived earlier this year because she wasn’t sure it fit properly.
But when the day came, it was her 15-year-old brother who walked across the stage at the downtown Chicago university to pick up McCall’s diploma. McCall, who had fallen ill over the Thanksgiving holiday but seemed to have recovered, collapsed near her Roseland home on Dec. 7. She died shortly afterward at a nearby hospital of causes that still are not clear.
Wearing his sister’s cap and gown and a multicolored stole that read “Black Student Union President,” Jaden Dupaty forced a smile when he reached his hand out for McCall’s diploma, his sister’s photo projected onto a black screen above him.
“To me it seems like the world is just a big blank for me right now,” Dupaty said later. “If Ashanti was here right now, I’d be cheering her on, just being her typical little brother.”
McCall was a psychology major who hoped to use her degree to advocate for abused children. She had discovered her passion during an internship at the Uhlich Children’s Advantage Network in Chicago, which works with children who have suffered trauma. Her mother, Sabrina McCall, recalls her daughter often crying when she came home, distraught over what she had seen.
In May, McCall won Roosevelt University’s Matthew Freeman Social Justice Award for her work with abuse victims, as well as her work as a peer mentor in the university’s Academic Success Center.
McCall graduated in 2012 with the last class of Maria High School on the Southwest Side, and had worked as the office secretary at St. Sabina Catholic Church every Saturday since she was 16. She considered the Rev. Michael Pfleger, the church’s pastor, a father figure. Pfleger, who led her memorial service Thursday, said McCall was “young of age but with an old soul.”
“Our church seats 1,200, and it was filled. Everybody that got up to speak, whether students from Roosevelt or family members, would just talk about her maturity. Her wisdom,” Pfleger said.
Throughout her short life, she made an effort to befriend “misfits of society” and “people who were outcasts for a reason,” her mother said.
“I remember having conversations with her, people would tell her, ‘You’re so beautiful and so popular, why do you get involved with these people?'” Sabrina McCall said. “And she would shut them down and say, ‘It’s really none of your business.'”
She initially was denied admittance to Roosevelt, but got in after meeting with counselors. She studied hard, putting off a relationship with a boyfriend in her final semester to concentrate on finishing with top grades.
McCall had a history of seizures. Over Thanksgiving, she made three trips to the emergency room in 48 hours, but it remained unclear what was wrong with her. After a week’s rest, she seemed to have recovered and went back to school.
On Dec. 7, Sabrina McCall was at work in Schaumburg when she received news that a neighbor had found Ashanti McCall face-down on the sidewalk, unresponsive, near 111th and South Wallace streets, less than a block from the family’s home.
McCall was taken to Roseland Community Hospital, where she was eventually moved onto a ventilator. Within two hours she was dead — “without rhyme or reason,” Sabrina McCall said. The family was told an ovarian cyst may have ruptured, but her mother still can’t understand.
“What was the thing that took my daughter from me?” she asked on Friday. “My faith can comfort me, saying this was what was supposed to happen. But my flesh does not agree at all.”
McCall and other family members sat through Roosevelt’s commencement ceremony in silence. Afterwards, friends and family gathered at the Academic Success Center, where refreshments were served and where a colorful, congratulatory banner with McCall’s name hung over her old desk.
It was a space where McCall and two friends, Eric Chaney and Jazmine Terrell-Harley, both 23, had spent many hours joking around. They said she could make anyone laugh and was filled with compassion, recalling how she once fed the homeless leftover food from a Black Student Union event.
“She could have a million more problems than you, but would always help you first,” Terrell-Harley said.
Terrell-Harley, who was with McCall the evening before her death, said she felt uneasy accepting her own diploma onstage Friday, stung with the pain of knowing her best friend couldn’t share that moment.
“It was very hard. That was something we both planned on doing together,” she said. “It was something we looked forward to this whole last year.”
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