Remembering Andrew Graham

BY ELLIS ARNOLD EARNOLD@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

He was the kind of person you don’t often meet.

At 8 years old, Andrew Gelston Graham earned a black belt in taekwondo. During a tournament, he received a first-place medal. But instead of keeping it, he turned around and gave it to his opponent, whom Andrew felt was the true winner because he had sharper skills and Andrew had won on a technicality.

When he was 6, his younger sister hurt herself, and in the emergency room, Andrew would not leave his sister’s side. Medical personnel had to allow him to sit outside the curtain until they finished caring for her.

In his college years, Andrew would buy sandwiches and give them to homeless people as he passed through Union Station in Denver.

That’s what Andrew likely did the night he was later murdered in 2009, according to his mother. She never knew about his generosity to the unhoused — she only later heard about it from police and his friends.

“But that was part of his charm. He didn’t boast,” Cyndi Gelston Graham said. “He didn’t self-aggrandize. There was none of that. He just did kind things and didn’t expect any recognition.”

Andrew, a 23-year-old University of Colorado Boulder graduate who had plans for grad school, was found shot to death about 5:30 a.m. on Nov. 6, 2009, in the front yard of a home in the Willow Creek neighborhood of Centennial near County Line Road and Yosemite Street. After nearly 14 years, the final person accused in Andrew’s killing was acquitted in a trial ending in June.

Though Andrew wasn’t one to seek praise, his death spurred an outpouring of words of respect and admiration from friends and academics.

“Sometimes people are praised in death for a character greater than they possessed but not in Andrew’s case,” one of his friends wrote in a tribute to Andrew. “He truly was one of the most caring, humble, intelligent people. His gentle influence on his peers made those around him better people. His absence is a loss to society.”

Standing out

Now 68, his mother fondly remembers how Andrew’s character shone through even as a small child.

When his young sister broke eggs on the floor at home, Andrew looked at his mother’s face, took his sister by the hand and hid her upstairs until their mom was no longer upset.

And as a young man, Andrew — who played ultimate Frisbee at CU Boulder and earned the nickname “Stitches” — had the respect of the young women around him.

“The girls would watch the Frisbee team. They would play a game, ‘marry, date or dump.’ Someone would pick out three men and everyone would have to answer who they would marry, date or dump. It became a tradition that we never even put Stitches into the game because he was an ‘automatic marry,’” a friend wrote, according to Andrew’s mother.

‘It was always about others’ Andrew was born in Mississippi after his mother met his father in nurses’ flight school for the Air Force.

After lots of moves, the family settled in Colorado in 1998, and Andrew got involved in math club and played the trumpet. A student in the Cherry Creek School District, Andrew played lacrosse, ran on the track team and excelled in school.

“But he was always rather quiet and shy,” his mother said. “It wasn’t until he got into college that he really blossomed in terms of his personality.”

His intellect led him to pursue engineering, a path where he made a name for himself in CU Boulder’s civil, environmental and architectural engineering department.

“Andrew was an outstanding student,” CU said in a 2013 news release, adding: “He was one of the first students to follow the department’s rigorous Engineering Science track curriculum. He did independent research on water quality as an undergraduate.”

In his honor, the department renamed a funding program: The Andrew Gelston Graham Graduate Fellowship provides support to outstanding students in the department, including tuition and stipends. Andrew was planning to start graduate school in civil engineering at CU Boulder at the time of his death.

He had lived in Alaska for eight months after finishing undergraduate school, working in the oil fields.

“And they worked 16-hour days six days a week, three weeks at a time, and then they’d get (some time) off,” his mother said. “But it was brutal.

“And the thing was, he was really good, and they wanted to promote him out of the field and into the office, and he didn’t want any part of a suit,” she laughed. “That’s why he decided to come home and go to grad school.”

Never flashy, Andrew wanted to “find someone nice and settle down and start a family and find a job — all the normal things,” his mother said. “He was very quiet. He didn’t talk about himself a lot to anybody. It was always about others.”

“He just was a good egg, he really was. And just so fun. And I just, I totally trusted him and knew that in my old age, he’d be there,” his mother said.

Keeping a legacy alive

Years later, his mother remembers the little things: how he liked Carlos Santana and the Eagles. How he’d strum on the guitar and wake his sister up. How he’d “just give her one of his lopsided smiles.” ough the suspects arrested in his killing received varying outcomes in court, Andrew’s mother felt that for her family, “all of us have received life sentences” in losing Andrew. e relationships he wove brought unlikely support into his mother’s life. CU Boulder’s men’s club ultimate Frisbee team, called Mamabird, has been “at my side through this entire thing,” his mother said.

Team members keep in touch by email and send her Mother’s Day wishes. She gets a call from a couple of them on Nov. 6 every year to catch up.

“ ey’re kind of like my adopted sons,” she said.

Although faces on the team have come and gone through the years, the members of Mamabird wear Andrew’s uniform number, 55, on the sleeves of their uniforms in his memory. At the Centex ultimate Frisbee tournament in Texas each year, the CU team members wear mustaches because Andrew started the team’s tradition of sporting the facial hair to that event, his mother said.

His mother set up a GoFundMe fundraising page online to help support the scholarship that CU named in his honor and the ultimate Frisbee team on which he played.

She hopes the page will help others and “keep Andrew’s legacy alive” — though she doesn’t think he would have given thought to what his legacy would be.

“He would (probably) be very embarrassed by all the accolades,” she said, adding: “But he’s the kind of person you don’t forget just because of how he was … he had a presence.”

One person who wrote a tribute to Andrew — one of the many written statements his mother has kept — recounted how Andrew carried himself through the challenges of his sport:

“He had his own style. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, he just didn’t seem to be affected. And I admired that about him. He was an individual. He was unique.”