FRAGO founder takes action to aid veterans

It wasn’t the Bat-Signal or a high-tech gadget that saved the day.

Instead, a phone call from a friend and a computer helped soothe some of the pain for the family of Justin Davis.

On July 15, earlier this year, three Germantown police officers gunned down an armed Davis at Cameron Brown Park. A U.S. Army veteran suffering from PTSD and depression, he left a grieving family to deal with funeral costs the Department of Veterans Affairs would not pay.

Two months later at the 9/11 Lunch with a Leader lecture series, Jerome Hardaway described the details of the incident to University of Memphis students, and how he took action in the hours following when a fellow veteran linked to Davis phoned for his help.

Hardaway, a U.S. Air Force veteran with three tours of duty in Iraq and three in Afghanistan, explained the social media campaign sparked by the phone call that led to him raising over $10,000 in 27 hours for the Davis family. “This is what Memphis is about,’ he said, discussing the growth of the fundraising effort. “The city came together to bury a hero.” This one event changed the 28-year-old’s career plans overnight.

Wearing a Batman T-shirt and jeans to the leadership lecture, Hardaway looks more like a student rather than a CEO. He shared his background with the audience and admitted that he left the military in 2009 battling anxiety and transition issues of his own. The economic recession was in full swing in America.

“It was a horrifying time for everyone. No one asked me how I wanted to be helped,” he said. The services for veterans only reached out to severely at-risk cases with a small chance of success, Hardaway noted.

Harnessing his passion for web design, the veteran earned his bachelor’s degree and sought out local mentors to develop his own design company. But after witnessing the failure of the VA to help Justin Davis, and motivated by the compassion of the fundraising campaign he led, Hardaway gave life to a veteran-based nonprofit known as FRAGO.

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