Lake Clifton’s Shauntaze Drake trying ‘to be the best role model’

Shauntaze is a student at Civic Works’ REACH! Partnership School at Lake Clifton.

Glenn Graham
The Baltimore Sun
February 16, 2016

Shauntaze Drake found his mother’s hand and held it tight.

She was crying and as much as the 17-year-old wanted to do the same, and needed to, he knew he couldn’t.

And so he didn’t. Instead, Drake stood stoically with his mother in the emergency room at University of Maryland Medical Center, grieving inside while saying goodbye to his slain brother.

Shauntaze’s “brother always told him if something happened to him, he would be the man of the house,” his mother, Kenya Cochran, said. “And that clicked in his head.”

Shaquil Hinton, 21, had been shot several times the night before he died in the early morning of May 25, becoming one of Baltimore’s 344 homicides in 2015.

Hinton, who led a troubled life, left behind a 2-year-old son.

Drake, now a senior at Lake Clifton and captain of the boys basketball team, loved and respected his half-brother, but chooses not to follow in his path.

Instead, he learns from Hinton’s mistakes.

“I’m young and it’s a lot of pressure,” said Drake, who also helps care for a younger brother and sister. “My nephew looks up to me, so I try to be the best role model I can be so he won’t follow his father — because my brother wasn’t living like he was supposed to live.”

By his mother’s account, Hinton was mostly kindhearted with a good personality and a ready smile. But she said he made the wrong decisions when he quit high school and got involved with drugs.

Drake has taken a different route. Basketball, he said, has helped save him.