WESTON, Fla. – The football team at Cypress Bay High School in Weston gathered Monday at practice, a day after their new assistant coach was killed in a hit-and-run crash over the weekend in Oakland Park.
Broward County Public Schools spokeswoman Nadine Drew confirmed that Carlo Ullysse Jr., 27, of North Lauderdale, had been newly hired as an assistant football coach.
She said he was not yet fully onboard, as he was still in the "paperwork hiring process."
"Nobody deserves that, you know? He's 27 years old. He's barely started life yet," former football player, Jack Barges, said.
Lt. Alvaro Feola, a spokesman for the Florida Highway Patrol, said Ullysse was walking along the shoulder of Interstate 95 near Commercial Boulevard about 6:30 a.m. Sunday when he was struck by a car. Ullysse had been involved in a crash minutes earlier.
Feola said the driver never stopped to help Ullysse, who was pronounced dead at the scene.
Troopers did not have a description of the driver or the car.
Parents whose children were coached by Ullysse, known as Coach CJ, said the students are devastated by his death.
"Coach was probably one of the most important people to me in my life at this moment," former football player Francisco Mena said. "He was there through the passing of my uncle. He was there through my hardships and track season."
"He worked really closely with a lot of us and, I mean, we all just couldn't believe it. I mean, it hit a lot of us hard," another former player, Ben Paz, said.
A GoFundMe page has been created to help Ullysse's family with the costs of his funeral.
"Words cannot even encompass the man that he was, that he is, that he embodied," a statement on the GoFundMe page said. "For those of you who knew CJ, he was nothing more than a beacon of energy, of life, of pure love. Anyone who knew him and was around that love was instantly captivated by it."