Alex Verner’s family, community continue to remember and share her legacy

CLAWSON — Feb. 13 will mark the one-year anniversary of the shooting at Michigan State University that took the life of Alexandria Verner, and her family and the Clawson community still feel her loss deeply a year later.

The tragic death of Verner hurts, but the city and her family are doing their best to remember her and carry on her memory and legacy.

Verner’s father, Ted Verner, said the family has been doing its best to settle into what he called the “new norm.”

“The new norm is the realization that Al is not with us,” he said. “Every time you feel that you’ve got into a rhythm or that you’re back into kind of a normal state that you don’t have this cloud hanging over you, a memory, a picture, a song, you know, some type of thing brings it all back.”

Ted Verner said a number of things remind him of his daughter, even a sunrise or sunset or the wind blowing, but the hardest thing is when he goes on social media and gets automated memories from years prior that show trips and holidays his family took with Alex.

“I slip into this new norm and I feel like I’m functioning and I’m moving along, and then there’s this wonderful picture of Al at a Fourth of July parade in 2014,” he said. “Those are the hardest ones to see, where you weren’t planning to see that memory, or a song comes on the radio that we knew that Al loved. Those are the ones, I think, they kind of grasp us and hit us the hardest.”

With these hard times, though, the family has seen immense love and support from the community.

Nancy Verner, Alex Verner’s mother, is a special education teacher at Schalm Elementary School and has seen students and teachers giving support and hugs, and she’s especially seen it this month with the anniversary approaching.

“Everybody knows it’s gonna be hard, and my administration is wonderful if I need to take time or anything,” she said. “We couldn’t have survived this past year without everybody’s support in our small little town.”

“When you’re driving around as you come home every day, it inspires you that there’s people, a year later, still have their lawn signs out supporting Al and the cause,” Ted Verner said. “Nancy and I and T.J. and Charlotte ... we just run into Clawson people all the time and are constantly getting support, ‘we’re thinking of you and giving you strength,’ and so that is a huge factor for us to get through this.”

Clawson High School has been doing its best to honor its 2020 graduate Verner over the past year, including renaming its court in the gymnasium “Alex Verner Court.”

On Feb. 13, the school and district will be honoring Verner throughout the day, Superintendent Billy Shellenbarger said, including wearing “MSU Strong” and shirts with Verner’s name on it, and celebrating her at a girls basketball game later that day.

“We will definitely honor her on that day, but again, we honor her on a lot of other days too, just because of who Al is, and it’ll just be a little bit bigger on that day,” he said.

“It is very difficult and the No. 1 thing we want to do is respect the Verner family as we all continue to remember Al, certainly grieve her loss,” he continued. “We want to respect their family and what they continue to go through. We support them every day, and a lot of people see them every day at school and at games and events and meetings and because of their involvement, but we want to respect them and the continued grieving process that they work through, Al no longer being here.”

The Alex Verner Scholarship, awarded to one Clawson graduate each year, also saw a big change. In its first year, the scholarship was for $10,000, but this year it increased to $25,000.

Ted Verner said the biggest thing his family tries to do is not only promote Alex’s legacy, but also not let her death go without repercussions.

“We continue to work with MSU, and we’re happy that we’ve seen progress, and Nancy and I are on several committees with the university to try to make things better,” he said. “We’re really attempting to work with the legislative division of Michigan and try to make a difference on crime and guns committed with crime and how to hold people accountable. So that’s the things that we’re focusing on as we like to get back to our new norm and making sure that some other family doesn’t have to go through what we went through.”