Gladness, a former volunteer boys coach at Fayetteville Christian, died suddenly Friday afternoon at Springdale Hospital after being taken to the emergency room with flu-like symptoms. Craig, who took Gladness to the hospital, said Gladness, 34, seemed fine until complaining about a headache Thursday night.
Craig said Gladness' death was apparently a bacterial infection made worse because Gladness had his spleen removed after being shot in high school. Gladness' funeral is scheduled for 11: 30 a.m. today at Life Harvester Church in Fayetteville, with burial at noon Friday at Paradise Gardens in Edmondson.
"He did so many things people don't know about," said Craig, who taught alongside Gladness at the Ozark Guidance Center. "Things he did went unnoticed and unheard of. He didn't need to be recognized.
" He was special to so many people. He had a lot of best friends. He could be that to everybody." Doliza Reyes-Bibbs said one of Gladness' last acts was symbolic of what kind of character he had. Reyes-Bibbs said Gladness learned after school Thursday that one of his students would skip the next week of school because his guardian couldn't afford gasoline.
Gladness drove with the guardian to a local gas station and paid $ 50 to fill the car's tank. Less than 24 hours later, Gladness was dead.
"It's absolutely a shock," said Reyes-Bibbs, the director for the Early Childhood Development at the Ozark Guidance Center. "His kids loved and adored him. He's going to be greatly missed. All he wanted to do was help kids." The 6-8 Gladness didn't play high school basketball in West Memphis but became a junior college All-America center at Carl Albert State in Oklahoma. He later played at Indiana for Bob Knight and played professionally in Europe.
