CONECUH COUNTY, Ala. — Hillcrest High School closed its doors Monday and gathered its counselors after the death of Ke’Maurion Porter, an 18-year-old senior and three-way football player who was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer on Interstate 65 on Sunday night.
Porter, of Evergreen, died at Evergreen Medical Center after the crash, according to the Conecuh County Coroner’s Office. He was 18 years old.
The school district canceled classes Monday, Sept. 14, and said instruction would resume Tuesday, Sept. 15, with a crisis response team on campus.
What Investigators Have Said
According to the coroner’s office, the sequence began with a wreck involving Porter’s vehicle and another vehicle on I-65 in Conecuh County. Porter got out of his vehicle afterward. While he was attempting to cross the interstate on foot, he was struck by an 18-wheel tractor-trailer.
The time of the crash has been reported as 9:29 p.m., near the 100 mile marker. That stretch of I-65 is in the rural northern part of Conecuh County, a few miles above the two Evergreen interchanges at Exit 93 and Exit 96 and just short of the Exit 101 interchange that serves the Owassa community. It is a rural stretch of divided interstate carrying heavy overnight truck traffic on the main route between Mobile and Montgomery.
Porter was transported to Evergreen Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
The Conecuh County Coroner’s Office and the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency are both investigating. In Alabama, those two agencies handle different halves of a fatal crash inquiry. ALEA’s troopers reconstruct the collision itself — vehicle positions, speeds, points of impact and the sequence of events — while the county coroner is responsible for pronouncing death and determining the cause and manner of it. Investigations of this kind commonly take weeks, and no further findings have been released.
A School Closes For The Day
Hillcrest High School announced Sunday night and Monday that it would not hold classes, and framed the decision around the family and the student body rather than logistics.
“Out of respect for the family and in recognition of the tremendous impact this loss has had on our students, faculty, staff, and school community, Hillcrest High School will be closed Monday, September 14, 2026,” the school said in a statement.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the student’s family, friends, classmates, teachers, and everyone affected by this devastating loss,” the statement read. “We ask our community to surround this family and our Hillcrest High School family with love, compassion, and support during this incredibly difficult time.”
In a separate notice to families, the school confirmed Porter’s death directly.
“It is with deep sadness that I inform you of the tragic loss of one of our students,” the school said. “Ke’Maurion Porter, a Grade 12 student at our school, passed away on Sept 13th. Our entire school community mourns this loss, and our thoughts and prayers are with Ke’Maurion’s family and friends.”
‘He Loved Football, He Loved The Weight Room And He Loved To Work’
Porter was listed as a tight end, running back and defensive end for the Hillcrest Jaguars — three positions, on both sides of the ball, the kind of load that tends to fall to a player a coaching staff trusts and a roster cannot spare.
Justin Nared, now the offensive coordinator at Baldwin County High School, was Porter’s head coach at Hillcrest last season. In a written tribute, Nared described a player whose reputation in Conecuh County preceded him.
“Ke’Maurion was an extremely hardworking young man with a big personality and an even bigger heart,” Nared wrote in a text. “He grew up in Conecuh County, spent some time in Andalusia and later transferred to Hillcrest his junior year. Because of his strong family ties in this area, so many people already knew him and knew the kind of young man he was. He loved football, he loved the weight room and he loved to work. He carried himself with confidence, believed in himself and brought energy wherever he went.”
Nared said the loss had landed hard well beyond one locker room.
“To lose a young man at only 18 years old, with so much life still ahead of him, is absolutely heartbreaking,” he said. “My thoughts, prayers and deepest condolences are with his mother, his entire family, everyone in the Conecuh County community, and the football family as a whole. Ke’Maurion will be remembered for his work ethic, his personality, his confidence and the impact he had on the people around him.”
The Crisis Response Team
When classes resumed Tuesday, the school said, a crisis response team made up of counselors, community mental health professionals and community leaders would be available to students. Resources will remain in place for as long as they are needed, according to the school.
School crisis teams follow a fairly consistent playbook in situations like this one, and the structure is deliberate. The first priority is accurate, consistent information, so that students hear the same facts from the school rather than piecing together rumors. The second is accessibility: counselors are typically stationed in a designated room where students can go without having to explain themselves or ask permission in front of classmates, and teachers are briefed on what to say and what signs to watch for.
The third priority is duration. Grief in a school building does not follow the academic calendar. The heaviest response usually comes in the first days, but counselors watch for a second wave weeks later — at the funeral, at the next home game, at graduation, on a birthday. Bringing in outside mental health professionals and community leaders, as Hillcrest said it would, expands the number of trusted adults available and keeps the school’s own counselors from carrying the entire load.
Close friends and teammates are often the students most affected and the least likely to ask for help, which is why crisis teams typically identify them early and check in directly rather than waiting.
About Hillcrest High School
Hillcrest High School serves grades nine through 12 on Jaguar Road in Evergreen and is part of the Conecuh County School District. It competes in Class 3A under the Alabama High School Athletic Association, and its teams play as the Jaguars in red, black and white.
Conecuh County is a rural county of roughly 12,000 people in south-central Alabama, with Evergreen as its county seat. In a county that size, a high school football roster is not an abstraction. Players are also cousins, church members, neighbors and the kids who bag groceries. A single loss propagates quickly through a community where most people are separated by one or two degrees, which is part of what Nared was describing when he said so many people already knew Porter before he ever put on a Hillcrest uniform.
A Danger Familiar To Troopers
Crashes on interstates carry a hazard that does not exist on most other roads: the moments immediately afterward. Traffic that was moving at highway speed does not stop, sight lines at night are short, and a person standing outside a vehicle is very difficult to see against dark pavement.
For that reason, state troopers and traffic-safety agencies generally advise motorists involved in a crash on an interstate to stay inside the vehicle with seat belts fastened if it is unsafe to move, or, if the vehicle can be driven, to pull well off onto the right shoulder or the nearest exit before getting out. Crossing lanes of interstate traffic on foot is discouraged under any circumstances, and after dark the margin for error is very small.
None of that reduces what happened on Sunday night to a lesson, and investigators have not released a full account of the circumstances. But it is the reason ALEA returns to the subject regularly, including each October during National Pedestrian Safety Month.
What Comes Next
The investigation by the coroner’s office and ALEA remains open. Funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of publication.
At Hillcrest, the immediate work is the ordinary and difficult business of a school going back to a normal schedule that is no longer normal — a senior class with an empty desk, a football team with an empty locker, and a building full of teenagers being asked to keep going.
South Alabama News extends its condolences to Ke’Maurion Porter’s family, his classmates and the Hillcrest High School community.