There was no phone call or parent-teacher conference, just a letter that Nakita Turner found in her son Shemar’s backpack stating her third-grader couldn’t return to the AW Brown Leadership Academy. His behavior had landed one too many office referrals.

It hurt her badly, but Nakita kept that letter for a long time. She’d pull it out and remind Shemar of that letter’s existence at every stage of his life, from when he became a five-star defensive tackle at DeSoto to an All-SEC selection at Texas A&M. Shemar Turner would be more than what they thought he’d be.

Nakita emailed the school that day, subject line, ‘I’ll never give up.’ She didn’t expect them to see in Shemar what she saw, but they’d be back one day with a story for the next mother who needed to hear it.

“I know there are some more mothers out there that have babies that they don’t see (how) they’re going to make it,” Nakita said.

A young Shemar always got good grades, but he was a stick of dynamite with a short fuse and little direction on where to place that explosive energy. His father wasn’t a steady figure in his life. Nakita’s afternoons were often derailed by a call from the school that she needed to take Shemar home. And she did, time and again until Shemar got into seventh grade and morphed into a man’s body, and Nakita realized someone needed to give him a man’s mentality.

That’s when she sent her son to live with her brother, Jeffrey Booker, 20 miles away in DeSoto. Nakita says it was the hardest thing she ever did.

“When they’re going into the mature stage, no matter how good of a mom you can be, you can’t teach a young man how to be a young man,” Nakita said.

Booker was Shemar’s youth football coach on the DeSoto Dolphins, where Seattle Seahawks defensive tackle Byron Murphy played running back. Now, he had to be Shemar’s father figure. 

“The reason why he was acting out was because all the other kids had their fathers, and he wanted his father to be there,” Booker said. “I got him to the point to trust the Lord and believe in the Lord. We couldn’t let that destroy him.”

Booker took Shemar into his busy life of coaching the DeSoto Nitro Track Club and running his barbershop, Classic Cuts and Styles. Those communities, Booker says, helped raise Shemar with him, including a barbershop regular, DeSoto head coach Claude Mathis.

Mathis molded a kid with lazy tendencies into a college prospect over four seasons. He moved Shemar from stand-up defensive end and Murphy from running back and linebacker and paired them up on the interior defensive line. DeSoto finished 19–5 over the duo’s final two seasons, and they gave opponents hell. Well, almost all opponents.

“When I played scout team quarterback, I used to make him and Murph miss like it wasn’t anything,” Mathis said.

But Nakita says she admires Mathis most for the emphasis he placed on academics. Living with Booker and playing for Mathis, the reports of bad behavior stopped. And Nakita would’ve known if they hadn’t. She drove every day to see Shemar from when he left her home in seventh grade to when he left for College Station.

Shemar chose to return to Texas A&M for his senior year over declaring for the NFL Draft, and has added 30 pounds of muscle with the help of two to three workouts a day and a Chipotle diet. Nakita and Jeffrey will be at every game. The pair has only missed one in three years, a South Carolina away game when Shemar had a concussion. Jeffrey has assumed the title of team barber.

Nakita lost that letter from the AW Brown Charter School. She turned her home upside down looking for the memento that once cut her so deep before admitting it was gone. But so is that version of Shemar Turner that prompted it, and Texas A&M fans will cheer on the man she and Jeffrey built this fall.

“Being able to let him be my mentor and show me what to do, how to do this, or how to handle this situation - he was a big part of who I am today,” Shemar said at SEC Media Days.