Joerome “Boodah” Carnilus Morgan, a 27-year-old Black man from Chattanooga, Tennessee, died on February 13, 2024. He had just turned 27 the day before, born February 12, 1997, and the timing alone makes the loss feel especially cruel, like life was moving forward and then, abruptly, it wasn’t.
Those who knew him spoke of someone who carried a lot of love in his life and left that love everywhere he went. He was a son to Tomeka Lollis and Joerome Morgan, raised in Chattanooga with a family that surrounded him, shaped him, and stood with him. He graduated from Hamilton County High School in 2015, and from there he tried to build something lasting, something solid—work he could call his own, a future he could steer with his own hands. He became a business owner, running a commercial cleaning company and a box-truck business, the kind of hustle that takes long days, discipline, and a belief that tomorrow can be better than today if you keep pushing.
But the heart of his life wasn’t just work. It was his children. He was the proud father of five, and that detail changes the shape of everything. Five young lives that knew his voice, his habits, the particular way he showed up, the way he could make ordinary moments feel safe and familiar. A father is often the anchor in the background—there for rides, for advice, for laughter, for discipline, for the quiet reassurance that someone has your back. When that anchor is gone, the water feels rougher. The world feels louder. The absence becomes something you bump into in a thousand little ways: birthdays, school mornings, the questions children ask when they’re trying to understand something no child should have to understand.
He left behind a wide, aching circle of family—his parents, his siblings, and a growing generation of nieces and nephews who will carry stories about him, even as time stretches those stories into memories. In families like his, grief isn’t one single event. It moves through the house like weather. It shows up in the empty place at gatherings, in the silence after a familiar joke would have landed, in the way people glance at their phones and still half-expect a call or a message that will never come. Love stays, but it changes form.
There were also loved ones who went before him—grandmothers Lafretta Lollis and Joerema Morgan, and grandfathers Zeke Lollis and Larry Bush Sr. When someone young dies, families often talk about reunion in heaven because it’s one of the only ways the mind can bear the unfairness of the timeline. It’s a way of imagining him welcomed, held, met with arms that know him, even as those left behind learn to live with the hollow space where his presence used to be.
In the end, what remains most clearly is not a public record full of answers, but the portrait of a man who mattered—who was loved, who worked, who fathered children, who belonged to a family that will say his name for the rest of their lives. The grief for Joerome Carnilus Morgan is not just for the moment of his death, but for all the moments that should have come after: the years of growing older, the milestones of his children, the ordinary days that would have stacked into a future. And yet, even in the heartbreak, there is something unbreakable in the way people keep him close—through stories, through memory, through the stubborn refusal to let his life be reduced to a date.
