“This is a day to honor Coby”
Family of Jacoby Hennings to celebrate young autoworker’s life
By
Jerry White
5 July 2018
The family of Jacoby Hennings is holding a memorial picnic this Sunday to celebrate the life of the young autoworker who died at Ford’s Woodhaven Stamping Plant, just outside of Detroit, on October 20, 2017. Large numbers of family members, friends and co-workers are expected to attend the “Coby Day” event, which will be held on Sunday, July 8, from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m., at Kennedy Park in the Detroit suburb of Eastpointe, Michigan.
“I wish I didn’t have to organize an event like this,” Shemeeka Hennings, Jacoby’s mother, a long-time Chrysler worker, told the World Socialist Web Site. “My son should still be here. We’ll never recover from this loss. But we are not the only ones who loved Coby, a lot of other people did too. This is a day we set aside to remember and honor Coby. We welcome everyone to join us,” Shemeeka said.
The July 8 memorial picnic, Shemeeka continued, would be “a day of fun for everybody, family and kids, with games and slides. Coby loved fireworks. There will be a microphone, and people will be able to speak. It will be free, because if we were asking for anything it wouldn’t be a Coby Day. Coby was a giving person and he would walk right up and give you anything if you needed it.”
More than eight months since the death of the Hennings, a 21-year-old temporary part-time worker (TPT), the full circumstances surrounding the incident are still not known. Officials from the United Auto Workers, Ford and the Woodhaven police say the young man took his life after a “labor dispute” in a UAW office in the Ford plant. While the police quickly closed their investigation,…