How Basketball Helped St. John’s Tariq Owens Cope With the Loss of His Mother

While his mother was enduring a prolonged battle with pancreatic cancer, Tariq Owens  was just a young teenager growing up Odenton, Md.

His daily routine involved sitting by Cassandra Owens‘ bedside and trying to comfort her, but he withdrew into himself.

“Every day I used to come home from school, I’d drop my book bag by the door, go upstairs and just sit in the room,” Owens, a 6-foot-11 redshirt sophomore forward who was born in New York City and now plays at St. John’s, said Thursday. “Most times she’d be asleep by the time I got home or I’d just be sitting in the room with a chair, watching TV and wait for her to wake up.”

“Tariq would just sit in the room and just watch his mother,” said Renard Owens, Tariq’s father and a Baltimore police officer for 17 years. “We knew she was dying and he wouldn’t talk. He was kind of withdrawn.”