West Boca Raton Community High School will remember a life taken too soon.
At Friday’s football game, the school plans to retire jersey number 6. Christo Maccius wore the number when he played football at the school. This summer, Maccius was shot and killed at the age of 25.
“Every day is a battle,” said his surrogate father, Steve Rubin, three months after the murder.
Rubin said Maccius battled to make every day better. Now his family battles to live without him.
“It’s just empty sometimes, missing something,” Rubin continued. “Like doing a puzzle and you’re missing a piece of a puzzle.”
The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office arrested Garry Pierre for the July 30 shooting.
Maccius spent ten years in and around West Boca High as a student, an athlete and a substitute teacher. Students said they still look for him in the hallways.
“I think that he’ll be riding around on the golf cart during class changes, or see him at lunch. And then I don’t,” said Eva Rubin.
At halftime of the football game, Maccius’s jersey will be the first one retired at West Boca High School.
“We would hope we would never have to do something like this, but it just speaks volumes about him that every one agreed we should retire the jersey,” explained Jack Clutter, an assistant principal at the school who knew Maccius well.
Rubin will go a step further. He’ll sell T-shirt and use money left over from a gofundme.com account to create a scholarship in Maccius’s name. He said Maccius always put others first and he believes a scholarship is an appropriate way to keep Maccius’s spirit alive.
“He would appreciate knowing his name is helping, his memory is helping, somebody else,” Rubin pointed out.