Family, friends and hundreds of other mourners packed into an upstate New York high school Thursday for a funeral for Kevin Ward Jr., the driver killed by NASCAR racer Tony Stewart in a race last weekend. "If there wasn't a dirt track in heaven, there is now," Kayla Herring, one of Ward's three older sisters, said to the crowd at South Lewis High School, from which Ward graduated in 2012. His other sisters lovingly joked about making fun of Ward for the cologne he wore — "Ladies love it," they said he would claim — before spraying it on his casket.
Rev. Kevin Westcott, president of Finish Line Chaplain Ministries, remembered Ward, 20, in his first sanctioned go-kart races: He lost the first one and won 13 in a row afterwards. "Kevin ran every race with everything he had," he said. "Well done, Kevin, you won your race."
Ward was killed Saturday night at a track where Stewart was racing a day before the Sprint Cup event. Many mourners wore black, white and orange, Ward's racing colors, to the funeral.
IN-DEPTH
SOCIAL
— Chris Pollone and Elizabeth Chuck