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Teen who died in Spring Hill wreck was 'like a magnet' to the friends he cherished

 
Friends left flowers and photos at the base of a the tree where Chris Hunter, 14, crashed on Tuesday. The Spring Hill teenager died in the collision, according to the Florida Highway Patrol. JACK EVANS | Times
Friends left flowers and photos at the base of a the tree where Chris Hunter, 14, crashed on Tuesday. The Spring Hill teenager died in the collision, according to the Florida Highway Patrol. JACK EVANS | Times
Published April 5, 2019

SPRING HILL — Victoria Drews met Chris Hunter in their sixth-grade language arts class, when their teacher moved everyone's assigned seats and put them next to each other. Chris, a naturally smart kid with a singular sense of humor, attached himself to Victoria immediately, she remembered — it's what he did with everyone he liked.

"He was like a magnet," Victoria, 14, remembered. "He had his way of doing everything, all the time. He never thought of changing for anybody else."

Over nearly three years of friendship, they developed a set of inside jokes that struck them alone as hilarious. He'd ask her to borrow a pencil, and when she turned to him, she'd see him grinning and holding up a fistful of pencils. He beat her in a round of the board game Connect Four, so she flipped the board in frustration, but he got chastised by a teacher for it — that entered their repertoire, too.

So when Victoria went Thursday to the curve on Laredo Avenue where Chris died on Tuesday, she brought a Connect Four board and a box of pencils and laid them at the foot of the memorial that grew there. Chris had crashed his parents' car into a tree by the side of the road,

"He wouldn't have liked all the flowers and the sad music," Victoria said. "He would've said, 'This is stupid.' ... He just thought being sad in general, it was boring to him."

Chris, an eighth-grader at Fox Chapel Middle School, was 14. He took his parents' car without permission, according to the Florida Highway Patrol, and lost control of it on a curve near his home. Nobody will face charges related to his death, the Highway Patrol said. He was alone in the car.

Ray Pinder, the principal at Fox Chapel, wasn't close to Chris, but said he knew him as an honors student with a reputation for helping new students settle into the school. Carly Nichols, a leadership teacher who taught Chris in his sixth- and eighth-grade years, remembered him as unusually introspective for his age. He knew he had academic gifts, she said, and he knew what he wanted out of his friendships and how to make the people he loved feel loved.

Nichols and her students shared stories about Chris during class in the days after his death, she said. One thing she heard from a close friend of his stuck with her: "Everybody in our friend group of guys, we're all together because, at some point, Chris really went and brought us together."

He rarely drew attention in class, she said. His intelligence got him good grades, but he didn't use it to command a spotlight. He was funny, but not a class clown; instead he sought out classmates who were having bad days and knew what to say to elicit a smile or a laugh.

"You wish you had at least 10 Chrises in every class," Nichols said.

Chris loved cars and video games and talking to his friends, Victoria said, but he rarely talked about himself or his aspirations.

"He wanted to know more about you before he wanted to talk about himself," she said.

The school is working on a way to memorialize Chris, Pinder said, and will take into account ideas from students. Counselors and social workers were at the school in the days after the crash to help students grieve. His parents didn't respond to a voicemail left by a Tampa Bay Times reporter.

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At the tree where Chris died, someone attached a small, ornate cross to a spot stripped of its bark. At the bottom, among balloons and flowers, was a collage of photos: yearbook pictures, Chris dressed as a cactus last Halloween.

Some of Nichols' students spent class time this week writing letters to Chris full of things they wish they'd told him. They planned to put them all in a box and leave it at the tree, Nichols said.

Since his death, she's looked through the binder of work he did for her class. There's insight into how he envisioned his future: college to become an engineer, or trade school to become a welder. He wanted to make just enough money to buy a house near the beach and live without worry. One prompt asked how he wanted to be remembered.

"... as a nice and a kind-hearted person," Nichols said.

Contact Jack Evans at jevans@tampabay.com. Follow @JackHEvans.