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Died January 19, 2021.
Robert E. Lee High School, Montgomery, AL
Football Coach
Dwayne Berry, 65, started working at Robert E. Lee High as an ROTC instructor and a football coach in 2002. About seven years later when he landed a job with the Department of Veteran Affairs, he left teaching but didn’t leave behind his team.
“When he started coaching, he just got really close to the coaches and players to the point that he didn’t want to leave,” his daughter, Brittany Berry-Johnson, said. “He loved it. It was one of his biggest pride and joys.”
The longest-tenured coach on Lee’s staff, Berry dedicated nearly two decades to the Generals before dying Jan. 19 after fighting for more than a month to overcome the impacts of contracting COVID-19.
In his unexpected death, he joined a tragic list that weighs over the high school. The Lee community, which refers to themselves as a ‘FamiLee,’ has endured the loss of several staff members and students in recent years. In two months, Lee’s Assistant Principal Ennis McCorvey III and basketball coach Rodney Scott also died due to COVID-19. McCorvey and Berry had been best friends and were members of the same fraternity, Berry’s daughter said.
“There are so many people who have been devastated by his loss because he was the person who would help anybody. He helped so many students, so many kids over the past years,” Berry-Johnson said. “He was motivating. He was a great mentor and great friend.”
A dedicated husband, father and grandfather, Berry retired as a master sergeant in the Air Force after 25 years of service. He was a sports fanatic — a longtime Cowboys and Alabama State University fan, who recently started rooting for Alabama, too, since watching some of his Lee players start their collegiate career there.
“He was a very loving man,” Berry-Johnson said. “He didn’t meet any strangers.”
She described her father as a dependable man who loved his family and loved to put a smile on their faces. He was known as ‘Pop Pop’ to his grandchildren.
When he tested positive for COVID-19 in early December, he called his daughter to ask what to expect since she’d contracted the virus during the summer.
She’d gotten through it, and his family had no doubt he would, too. He’d always been healthy, active and athletic.
“He said he was feeling extremely weak and fatigued, but that was pretty much it at first,” she said.
The next week though, Jacinta Berry found her husband on the floor and called for an ambulance. He was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit on Dec. 18.
His vital signs were good, but he’d had asthma and his lungs were suffering.
“The virus attacked his lungs really bad and he was on a ventilator,” Berry-Johnson said. But despite that, “We had hope. They kept saying he’s doing really good, it was just his lungs.”
Things were looking up, with doctors saying Berry was stable enough to be moved out of the ICU. The morning before his transfer though, the Berry family was told they needed to hurry to the hospital as their dad’s heart rate and blood pressure fluctuated into dangerous territory.
“That whole day we were just on pins and needles like, ‘Come on Dad, we need you to come through,’” Berry-Johnson said.
He died just before 10 p.m. — his wife of nearly four decades sent home without him. He was a jovial man, she said.
The past few weeks, their home has been unwelcomely quiet.
“It’s very devastating,” Berry-Johnson said of her dad’s death. “We were in shock. We didn’t see anything like this happening. My dad is a fighter so we really thought he was going to fight through this. And he did fight for weeks, he just didn’t make it.”
More than her family, she recognizes the pain his death has caused throughout the community.
“A lot of people are saying they are going to truly miss him. He was that person that a lot of people depended on,” she said. “My dad really, really just loved being a helping hand to everyone, and I’m sure my dad wouldn’t want anyone to be sad and upset about him passing. I’m sure he’d say stay true to themselves and do the work that God put them on this earth to do.”
To those who knew him, she asked “keep his legacy going. … Continue to say his name. And look over us because this is hard for me and my family.”