A teenage skateboarder died in his arms. Now he'll be a pallbearer at his funeral

Ricky Vazquez was looking down at his phone, texting while a friend drove him along East Lancaster Avenue about 6 p.m. Wednesday.

When he heard a loud "boom!" from just ahead in the road, his first thought was, "I know you didn't just rear-end somebody," he said Friday.

He looked up to see that a skateboarder had been hit by a truck near the intersection of Chester Road, and yelled at his friend to stop.

His eight years of service in the U.S. Marine Corps, including combat lifesaver training, kicked in, and he said he started thinking of the biblical story of the good Samaritan.

"It instantly clicked," said Vazquez, a Fort Worth native living in Dallas who has taken classes at TCU. "I was like, yo, you need to put this into action."

Dropping his phone, he rushed to Christafer Gardner, 16, who was lying in the center lane of Lancaster bleeding, and he began performing CPR along with several other people.

"I heard a loud scream," Vazquez said. He didn't realize at the time that it was Gardner's father, David Black.

Black said Thursday that he had waited more than 13 years to be reunited with his son, Christafer Gardner, who died after the skateboarding accident later in a hospital despite the efforts of Vazquez and the others.

"I thought we had him. I really thought we had him," Vazquez said of Gardner. He said the teen uttered a sputtering cough, like someone who nearly drowned.

"I held his hand and I was like, 'Come on, come on,' " Vazquez said. He said he had no idea that one of the people who had clustered around was Gardner's father.

Black said that in that moment, he knew that Gardner was alert enough to see him, recognize him and hear him saying goodbye.

The group started to get hopeful after Gardner coughed, Vazquez said.

Then, "I felt this chill and this comfort and I'm like, 'He's gone,' " Vazquez said.

Vazquez and Black made contact on Thursday after Vazquez learned that Black was the teen's father. He said he wanted to reach out to Black when he learned that Gardner was only 16.

Vazquez's family runs Tree of Life Funeral Directors on South Handley Drive. The Tarrant County medical examiner assigned Gardner's remains to Tree of Life on Thursday.

After he and Black spoke on the phone, Vazquez said he agreed to serve as a pallbearer at the teen's funeral, which hasn't been arranged yet.

Black said Thursday he moved to Fort Worth from Comanche and had just reunited with his son in April. Because he and Christafer's mother, Sacha Gardner, had a falling out when the boy was 3, he hadn't seen his son since 2005.

Black said he stayed at the Salvation Army on Lancaster with his son after "my mom put us out."

He said becoming homeless was just the latest blow in a hard life for Christafer, who lost his mother in 2016.

Last Saturday, Christafer went to church and formally became a Christian, Black said.

"Last night I was at the hospital just praying to God, 'Don't make me wait 13 years just for a few months with my son,' " Black said.

"But I feel like I did my part. I feel like God was waiting on Chris to do that, because he had been through so much."

The skateboarding accident happened about a block from the intersection of Lancaster and Riverside Drive, rated the most dangerous intersection in the city by the Fort Worth Safe Communities Collaborative.

Vazquez is active in Democratic Party politics and was elected a precinct chairman in Dallas. He says he'd like to run for mayor of Fort Worth someday. He's the grandson of Arthur Lee Conley, who had a day named in his honor in 1999 by former Mayor Kenneth Barr.

While in the Marines, Vazquez said he was sent to Afghanistan, where his unit was attacked, as well as Japan and the Philippines.

This story was originally published June 22, 2018 at 2:43 PM with the headline "A teenage skateboarder died in his arms. Now he'll be a pallbearer at his funeral."