A mother’s pain echoed through Tampa First Seventh Day Adventists Church a week after losing the man she calls her favorite son.
“I lost one of them and that was my favorite one,” Magalie Joseph Adelson cried out. “I miss him.”
Her son, 20-year-old Wathson Adelson, and another driver allegedly started fighting on the morning of November 21 after cutting each other off in traffic on Manhattan Avenue near Waters Avenue. Investigators say Adelson was then stabbed in the head with an ice pick.
“The early departure of an innocent young man who was slaughtered like a lamb by a motorist in a road rage adventure,” said his aunt, Santanna Guzman.
Adelson was in the hospital for three weeks, his injuries so severe that his family says he could never communicate to them exactly what happened. Last week, he died.
“A young man with so much promise, such a bright future, is just cut down in the prime of his youth,” said Charles Foster, a family friend who helped counsel Adelson as he prepared for college.
But rather than focus on his death, the crowd packed into his funeral on Sunday wanted to remember his life as a high school and college football player, a new father, and an active member of the church family.
“Although his dream is shattered, his memory will live on forever through all of us,” Guzman said.
Friends say perhaps one of the biggest legacies Adelson left behind is a lesson about road rage. “He has to bring attention to road rage,” said Foster. “The young people who are left, please, we don’t want to bury another young person.”
The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office is still looking into exactly what happened to Wathson. At this point, no arrests have been made. Once the Sheriff’s Office finishes that investigation, it’ll be turned over to the State Attorney’s Office for review.
Source: 10 News
