‘I tried to capture everything about him’: NC casket maker honors Kobe Bryant

NORTH CAROLINA — Earlier this week, casket maker Fletcher Collins loaded the customized tribute memorial into a rented van before he and a couple of friends drove cross-country from his business in the Mount Olive community of Elizabethtown to Los Angeles.

Collins’ destination over the roughly 2,260-mile trip is a public memorial service being held on Feb. 24 for basketball legend Kobe Bryant and his daughter, Gianna “Gigi,” at the Staples Center, nearly a month after their deaths in a Jan. 26 helicopter crash in California.

There, in front of the center on Feb. 25, he unveiled to the public what he calls his masterpiece, the “Staples Center,” which he dedicates to the families of Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter and the seven other people killed in the accident.

Kobe Bryant was a longtime Los Angeles Laker, an NBA franchise that plays its home games at the Staples Center.

Since his death, the nation has mourned the loss of the 41-year-old NBA Hall-of-Famer, who was an 18-time All-Star and 15-time member of the All-NBA Team.

Bryant, Collins said, was one of his favorite professional basketball players.

“I loved what he brought to the game,” he said.

Collins, who has built customized designer caskets for roughly a decade over his 47 years, said social media led to what he called this humbling assignment. Through social networking, he added, a friend of Bryant’s family reached out, asking if Collins could create some type of memorial art to honor Kobe and the other victims.

“I tried to capture everything about him,” said Collins, who also is an assistant pastor at Greater Temple Holiness Church in Elizabethtown.

Images from Kobe and Gigi Bryant's memorial celebration Images from Kobe and Gigi Bryant's memorial celebration

Painted largely in Laker purple and gold, the memorial casket is overlain with a mock-up of the Staples Center hardwood court, complete with miniature basketball goals on each end and 24-second clocks. One side is trimmed with what is intended to be the Los Angeles skyline.

At center court, on top of the casket, are five gold miniature NBA championship trophies representing the number of titles Bryant won with the Los Angeles Lakers.

“RIP Gigi,” can be read on one side of the memorial in tribute to Gianna.

“Mamba Out” (Kobe gave himself the nickname “the Black Mamba) is inscribed on the other along with the numbers 24, 9, 2 and 9.

Over his career as a Laker, Kobe wore the numbers 8 and 24. His daughter won the number 2 as a basketball player at Harbor Day School in California. As for 9, it represents the total number of people who died in the helicopter crash.

“This is nothing people have ever seen. This is something I created,” Collins said last week from his work site off Collins Place on the edge of Elizabethtown. “And the whole vision behind it — I cannot take the pain away. I try to capture moments to bring back life, energy, and the inspiration of the loved ones and their legacy.”

The casket, which he said cost $13,000, was built over three and a half days. Donations helped defray the cost, and the names of those donors have been added to a picture of Kobe’s jersey that is meant to be part of the tribute memorial set.

Before the trek to L.A., the casket rested on a black drape that covered a metal table inside Collins’ weathered paint booth. The old concrete-block-and-wallboard storage building, approximately 36 feet long by 30 feet wide, was cluttered at one end with paint cans, carpentry tools, a chair and a rusting garage heater.

“It is unique,” said Velma Manuel-McKoy, a longtime friend of Collins who dropped by his business, Glorious Custom Designs, to bless his cross-cross trip. “It’s everything about Kobe, his daughter and the (seven other) people who lost their lives. It is everything they would have asked for and more.”

This isn’t the first special casket that Collins has designed, crafted and painted with his hands.

In the past, he has built custom caskets for a 6-year-old boy who drowned last year in the Chattachoochee River near Columbus, Georgia, and one for Frank Lucas, the notorious drug lord played by actor Denzel Washington in the 2007 crime film “American Gangster.”

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It is that same contact, the man who reached out to him to build the Lucas casket, who put Collins “in the mix of the Bryant family and friends,” according to the casketmaker.

“He grew up playing with Kobe’s father,” he explained. “He put out my work to them. My name came up to do something. Right now, the family don’t have no clue about what I did design. From everything I’ve been told, they know I’ve done something.”

Collins said the family friend opted not to do media interviews about the Kobe Bryant tribute in respect to the Bryant family.

As for where Collins hoped to have the customized casket placed once he reached Los Angeles, he said last week, “That, I won’t know until I once get there. That will be up to the Staples Center and the family to make that decision.”

If they are not interested in keeping his work, he said he intends to put it up for auction and use the proceeds to start a nonprofit. Collins wants to make special caskets for children who die at an early age.

“I will take my gift and I do what I do to bring a smile on a family’s heart with my gift and talented ability,” Collins said. “That’s why I go hard the way I do. I take every family as though they’re my family. And I take what I do to heart.”

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