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At The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Amarillo, Chris Doerue’s brothers took turns speaking about their late brother. King Doerue stepped on stage, seeing walls slick with a light pink shade, a wooden piano stationed to his right and pictures of Jesus performing baptisms scattered around the room. He then began to recall the pair’s relationship.

Doerue thought back to bus rides they spent together, sharing the same seat. During Doerue’s freshman year, Chris would sneak away from the varsity basketball locker room to watch his brother. Steve Jackson, Chris’ former basketball coach, would have to kick the pair out of the gym sometimes an hour or two after regular practice ended, finally allowing the janitors to clean up.

“‘I’m going to do everything from here on out for my brother,’” Jackson remembers Doerue saying. “‘Everything. He would have been with me every step of the way.’”

Shortly before 6 p.m. on May 8, the evening before Mother’s Day, Amarillo (Texas) police responded to a shooting on N. Johnson Street, about 14 minutes from Tascosa High School. They found Doerue’s brother, Chris, lying in a front yard with gunshot wounds. An ambulance rushed Chris to a nearby hospital, where he later died at the age of 25. 

Doerue, Purdue’s running back with NFL aspirations, was closest with Chris out of anyone in the family, Jackson said. The pair played basketball together, and Chris tried to attend most of Doerue’s football games with the rest of the family. The two were inseparable, and bonded over their shared love of sports after their family took refuge in the United States during the ethnic and civil conflict in Ivory Coast.

My brother was a Legend, he in heaven now.:hearts:

— King Doerue (@king_doerue) May 9, 2022

“The entire network of the Doerue brothers is very close, but those two in particular were as tight as they come,” Jackson said.

Chris played basketball at nearby Wayland Baptist University, allowing him to attend all his younger brother’s football and basketball games. During Chris’s senior year, Doerue made Tascosa’s freshman team. The brothers stayed after practice to play one-on-one against each other. Jackson said members of the basketball team would stick around and watch the “physical” matchup.

Chris watched Doerue blossom from a quiet seventh grade basketball and football player to a strong, powerful guard and running back. He ran and lifted with Doerue four days a week, adhering to a strength program Tascosa head coach installed for Doerue and the rest of his team over the summer. 

“He bought into what we were doing, just the whole training, and he would put extra work in to make himself better,” football head coach Kenneth Plunk said.

Doerue became one of the top running backs in Texas after progressing into an “electric runner,” according to former teammate Joseph Plunk. Positioned at the helm of Tascosa’s flexbone and option-heavy offense, Doerue ended his senior year with 1,356 rushing yards, 351 passing yards, 21 rushing touchdowns and six receiving touchdowns.

Doerue had just come off a junior season when Tascosa went to the state championship. Chris watched from one of the top rows in the lower bowl as Tascosa recovered an onside kick, trailing late to Longview High School. On the ensuing play, Kenneth dialed up a “hitch and pitch.” Doerue leaked out to the right side as Joseph executed phase one of the playcall, rifling a quick strike over to Brayden Ridgway. 

Rising in their seats, Chris and the Doerue family screamed as Ridgway pitched the ball off to Doerue, who ran off-balanced to the 40-yard line before tip-toeing along the sideline into the end zone.

Emma Kelly | Design Editor

A year later, Doerue told Chris that Purdue, a late-comer to the recruiting process, “felt like home.” Doerue had only told Kenneth and his parents. Chris was the first sibling to find out. 

But Doerue first shedded a tear at Chris’ service when he mentioned their bedroom. Following the Ivory Coast ethnic and civil conflict in the mid-1990s, the Doerue family found Catholic Family Services, a refugee relocation center in Amarillo. In 2003, the 11-person family found a small home through the organization.

Doerue and Chris shared a room and bed for at least five years. One day, while Jackson was picking up a jersey from Chris, he walked into their tiny room, the ground cluttered with athletic shoes and work out clothes. Doerue and Chris were asleep together on the bed.

“‘We slept in the same bed at one point we were that close,’” Jackson remembers Doerue saying. “We were around each other all the time.”

Ahead of Purdue’s first game against Penn State, Doerue laced up his black Nike cleats in the locker room. It’d be the first game Chris wouldn’t see, and with a sharpie, he wrote out “#LLC.” 

On a goal line pitch, he dove into the endzone for the touchdown. He popped off his helmet and mouthed three words as he pointed to the black sky above: “Long Live Chris.”

Published on September 14, 2022 at 11:51 pm

Contact Anthony: aalandt@syr.edu | @anthonyalandt