‘Wonderful friend, human, student and person’: TCU community honors Wes Smith at vigil
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Wes Smith
Texas Christian University junior and former Horned Frog football team member Wes Smith was fatally shot in the West 7th district in the early hours of Sept. 1, 2023. Here’s everything we know about what happened.
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Hundreds of TCU students walked down Stadium Drive just before 8 p.m. Wednesday to attend a candlelight vigil for Wes Smith on the Fort Worth university’s campus.
A junior finance major at TCU, Smith died after he was shot three times in the city’s West 7th district early Friday in what police have said appeared to be a random attack by a stranger, 21-year-old Matthew Purdy.
Lights glowed Wednesday night surrounding Frog Fountain in front of Scharbauer Hall on the TCU campus, where Smith’s family, classmates and TCU staff attended the private vigil to honor him.
Wes’ mother, Dorree Jane Smith, who attended along with his father, Philip, shared a story of faith, hope and love at Wednesday night’s vigil.
Many others shared their love for Wes Smith.
In a phone call with the Star-Telegram a few hours before the vigil, Kelly Trager — an assistant professor at the Neeley School of Business at TCU — said Smith was an “absolute joy” to have in her Entrepreneurial and Regulatory Business Environment class.
“He was curious, he was motivated,” Trager said. “He was very much a group leader.”
Trager said that while Smith had earned an internship in the middle of a semester, he did not let that get in the way of his studies, specifically in her course.
“He made it a point to reach out individually to each of his team members to find out how he could make sure that he wasn’t increasing the load on them,” she said.
She said he was very engaged in her class and a “team player.”
“He was just a wonderful human,” Trager said.
“It’s a huge loss to the community, to Neeley, to everyone who met him, interacted with him,” Trager said. “We are a tight-knit group and when you’re a Frog, you’re a Frog for life here and we take that very, very seriously. And I don’t know anyone who met Wes who didn’t just find him to be an absolute wonderful friend, human, student and person.”
Ken Corbit, who teaches a marketing communications and research course at TCU, also said at the vigil that Smith was a great leader.
“He probably had fifteen friends who came up to me and said the same thing, ‘Wes was my best friend,’ which just showed the character of the individual,” Corbit said.
Although he was seen as a leader, Smith also wanted to see his classmates succeed.
“His presence was so strong, but he always uplifted the group around him,” Corbit said.
“There’s going to definitely be a leadership vacuum that’s there, but the beautiful part is that Wes surrounded himself with other leaders who are stepping into that vacuum already,” he said about Smith’s impact on his classmates.
Corbit said he was devastated when he learned the news that Smith was killed Friday morning and he had seen him just the day before.
“The last thing I said is, ‘Hey, everyone have a safe weekend, but be careful. It’s the first (football) game. It’s a holiday weekend.’ And on the way out Wes gave me a fist bump and smiled at me,” Corbit said. “And twelve hours later he was gone. So it was one of those moments that you just reflect on and go, ‘Is this real?’”
Purdy is charged with murder and police say he could not give a clear reason why he killed Smith.
“A loss of this magnitude, you can never prepare for,” Corbit said. “I think the one thing that’s beautiful is students are really leaning into this idea that a life well lived is far more important than a life lived long. And I think that they have moved into the place of grieving, but now celebrating him where they recognized that Wes lived a life that was worth celebrating, and now they’re in that place of healing and making sure that the family is taken care of.”
A former member of the TCU Horned Frogs football team as a freshman in 2021-22, Smith also coached a middle school football team in Fort Worth, and some of those athletes also attended the vigil.
“He was really positive and everything. He was a good coach. He was always just happy,” said 14-year-old Oliver Bennett, who plays for the All Saints’ Episcopal School football team.
“It was really sad,” said Bennett, when asked how he and his teammates reacted to Smith’s killing. “We all just mourned together and prayed.”
“It still hurts,” said Bennett about his football team. “But I think we’re doing a lot better now and we play for him.”
Bennett had also seen Smith on Thursday, a day before he was shot.
“It makes me happy and sad. Sad that he’s gone, but happy that he was my coach,” Bennett said.
Smith was a Kappa Sigma fraternity member at TCU and students from other fraternities say his passing has hit home.
“For me, it’s just crazy,” said Jeremiah Witkop, a sophomore and Beta Theta Pi fraternity member at TCU. “You see the stuff on the news all the time and then all of a sudden this is right in your community.”
Witkop says that he wanted to come out to the vigil to support Smith and encourage other fraternity members at TCU.
“If it was one of your guys in your fraternity, you’d want everyone around campus to support you, too,” said Witkop. “I just feel like TCU is unique in that way, that we all care about each other and we want to just show love and support and just be there for each other.”
Witkop says he and some of his friends were in the West 7th entertainment district the night Smith was shot.
“That could’ve been one of us,” he said. “And we gotta be grateful for every day that we’re alive and just thank God that we’re here today and, you know, just try to make a difference and stay OK, stay close with your friends, because you never know what might happen.”
Smith, 21, of Germantown, Tennessee, is survived by family including his parents, Dorree Jane and Philip Smith, and older brothers Dawson and Graham.
This story was originally published September 6, 2023 at 10:35 PM.
