After pledging to a Kennesaw State University fraternity, Kamran Shibly and his new band of brothers answered personal questions. It was a way to get to know each other better, and the questions were thought-provoking.
“Do you have any regrets?”
Shibly didn’t.
“No regrets,” Shibly wrote. “Life’s simple. You make choices. Never look back.”
Shibly’s outgoing personality and constant smile meant he was always surrounded by friends. But after being killed in a weekend car crash, those friends are now clinging to the words Shibly wrote and the legacy he left behind.
“He’s just one those guys that you’ll never be able to forget,” Tony Huber told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Shibly, 19, was eastbound on New Chastain Road around 3:30 a.m. Saturday when he lost control of his 2007 Honda Accord, according to Cobb County police. Investigators believe speed was a factor when the car left the road and hit a tree. Shibly died at the scene of the wreck, just minutes from the house where he lived with his mother.
News of his death spread quickly among Shibly’s friends. At Saturday’s Kennesaw State football game, a moment of silence was held in his honor.
Huber and Shibly were classmates at Lassiter High School before both enrolling at KSU. As freshmen, both joined the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. An international business major, Shibly loved college life, but he loved his family and friends even more.
“He loved helping out and being a part of everything,” Huber said. “He played a big part in every committee in our fraternity.
Shibly was running for secretary of his fraternity in an election held Sunday night. But the election meant little to Shibly’s classmates and friends, who held a candlelight vigil in his honor at the student center.
“It was honestly one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen,” Ryan Szabo, a University of Georgia sophomore, said Monday night. “There were so many people there.”
Szabo also went to Lassiter, and met Shibly the first day of their junior year. Szabo had moved to Cobb County from Maryland the previous year and was still making new friends. When he became friends with Shibly, he was instantly friends with many others.
“He was in everybody’s friends group,” Szabo said. “Everyone had a friends group, and he was a part of all of them.”
Szabo had hoped Shibly would join him at UGA, and even though they were hours apart, they talked almost every day. News of Shibly’s death was hard to accept, and Szabo said he left Athens and drove to be with Shibly’s family. He spent the weekend with friends, sharing memories of the former classmate with a knack for offering good advice.
His fraternity brothers had shirts made to wear when competing in intramural sports, only Shibly didn’t live to be able to get his. But his brothers did, and when it’s framed, they’ll give it to his mother, Huber said.
Above all, friends said Shibly was the type of person they’d also like to be.
“He just wanted for all of us to be together,” Huber said. “He loved making people happy. He loved being around people.”
Funeral arrangements were pending late Monday. But his service will be held in Chicago, where other family members live.
— Staff writer David Markiewicz contributed to this article.
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