By Luke Frazier
The Island News
In late October of 2015, 36-year-old Ver’mon “Mony” Steve was duct-taped, kidnapped, and murdered in Beaufort. As with many violent deaths, the jagged ripples tore through family, friends, and the community at large, leaving heartache behind.
Now, more than 10 years later, his spirit is being celebrated through the creation of Mony’s House, which includes efforts to educate young people about audio engineering, music production, and cinema at camps this summer. These are all things that aligned with Ver’mon’s interests while he was alive.
Janice Steve is Ver’mon’s mother and describes her son as having been gentle, quiet, and caring. She says he believed there was good in everybody and wanted to see the best in people come out. According to Steve, that belief is part of the fuel for the summer camps happening in Columbia and Port Royal this month.
“Anything that we can do to allow the young people to see that they can truly be whoever they’d like to be,” Steve said recently, “Whatever we can do to keep them focused or help get them focused.”
Steve says the summer camps can help young people avoid having regrets later in life when they consider what they could have been had they explored passions and gained skills.
“I think Mony’s House is here as a result of him being very focused on the arts and music,” Steve said, “[Because] those are the things that he tried to pull out of other people as much as he possibly could.”
The existence of Mony’s House is also a result of work by Pervis Walker, the Executive Director of the Great Grand Family Foundation. Walker wanted to find a meaningful way to honor Ver’mon, a friend since childhood.
He reached out to Janice Steve about a year ago and shared his vision. He got permission to name the program after Mony and invited her to join the board and help develop something that positively reflected Mony’s life and legacy.
“To partner with his mom in order to keep that creative legacy alive is a deep honor for me,” Walker said. “It was these types of programs that my friends and I were looking for when we were young. … I wasn’t a big athlete or scholar. We were dreamers, we were creators, and there wasn’t a lot of space for creators.”
Then the challenging work of figuring out funding, goals, responsibilities, partnerships, and myriad related details began in earnest.
“Our goal has never been to simply host a summer camp. We wanted to create a pipeline that introduces young people to career opportunities in the creative arts,” Walker insists, “Now kids can come and enjoy being creative and learning at no cost.”
Walker said it’s important that students can see how their passions can become careers.
One young person poised to express her creativity in the upcoming cinema camp is 15-year-old Jene’lle Tuttle-Burgess of Beaufort. She wants to be in the film industry when she is older, based on her limited experience with it.
“When I was younger, I used to always make movies and like mini videos on my mom’s phone,” she recalls, “I want to learn more about actual things people who are in the film industry use and what they actually do day-to-day.”
Although she was not aware the cinema camp was created to honor Ver’mon’s life after his death, Tuttle-Burgess said it adds to the experience.
“I think it does because there’s meaning behind it,” she reflected, “I think it makes it more deep, and you can kind of feel more connected to it.”
One individual who will be teaching Jene’lle Tuttle-Burgess and other students is Jamie Fleming. He is founder of Edify, a company that creates digital film assets for nonprofits, government institutions, schools, and other youth-serving agencies.
Fleming was excited when Walker reached out to collaborate in realizing the vision for Mony’s House, especially given the inspiration behind it.
“There is hurt and heartache in the community,” Fleming acknowledged, “But how do we move beyond that loss and still commemorate that loss?”
Fleming is a self-described social entrepreneur who came back to Beaufort to help his elderly parents. He says he noticed a gap in creative services that also looked to serve the community, a niche he hopes his company can help fill.
Fleming says he used to run something called “Poetry & Pancakes,” and a light bulb went on.
“I was able to see the rippling effect of that,” Fleming said, “How having a place where all types of people, young people, older people you know could express themselves through the spoken word, whether it’s poetry, whether it was song. How empowering that is.”
This made Fleming a natural partner in the effort to honor Ver’mon and teach kids to let their creative spirit soar.
And while Janice Steve’s spirit has been damaged, she has taken some small comfort in articulating what she thinks Ver’mon’s message to camp students would be.
“If I focus on what I want to do I can become any and every thing that I feel like I can become — if I stay focused and aim high.”
Steve also takes comfort from her faith, and this has helped her forgive her son’s murderer.
“I know that me being a Christian and believing in every word that I’ve learned from the Bible, that the forgiveness is for me, and not necessarily for the person. From the beginning God gave me that peace that surpasses even my understanding.”
Luke Frazier is a writer and award winning media producer who moved to the Lowcountry in 2024. He runs NOW Communications and can be reached at nowandfuturecomms@gmail.com.
