The smell of decomposing bodies is first to strike the senses of the kids in the Terrance Kelly Youth Foundation, but it's always the sight of a coroner's tag, looped around a lifeless toe, that truly gets them.

The Contra Costa County morgue is one stop on Landrin Kelly's six-week, scared-straight tour of Richmond, Calif., designed to share lessons from the murder of the foundation's namesake — Landrin's son — 10 years ago this week.

In the intervening stops before the morgue — the visit to San Quentin Prison, a trauma center, cautionary tales from convicted criminals — it's easier to shrug off the finality.

Standing face-to-toe with a sheet-covered body, Kelly finds, is harder to forget.

"They're scared," he said. "They need to see this and see what the family goes through, too."

Many families, in fact, in the case of Terrance Kelly.

Kelly was the standout linebacker and running back at powerhouse De La Salle High School, undefeated in his prep career, bound for the University of Oregon in 2004 with three other prep teammates, scholarships in hand.

Around 10:40 p.m. on Aug. 12, 2004, less than 48 hours before he was scheduled to fly back to Eugene for fall camp practices, Kelly was shot four times — three in the head, once in the back — with a .22-caliber rifle as he waited in a car to pick up a friend.

His absence still haunts and inspires.

For the last decade, Landrin and his wife, Mary — Kelly's stepmom — have deflected the pain by helping others find their own way out of Richmond. They want Terrance to be a powerful reminder that a life well-lived — no drugs, no gangs, a sense of purpose — can extend forever, and their work leaves them fulfilled and hopeful, supported faithfully by Terrance's former friends and coaches.

But keeping Kelly's memory alive for the 80 or so kids enrolled in the foundation has taken its own toll and kept the scar tissue fresh.

Now comes a new reminder in the Sony film "When The Game Stands Tall" that focuses on Kelly's death as part of a larger story of the De La Salle football program that won 151 games in a row from 1992 to 2004. As Landrin and Mary slipped into a theater for a recent private screening with Sony executives, they weren't surprised that the death's reenactment got them.

They were surprised at how quickly and deeply the hurt sets in, a decade later.

"The first half hour we sat there in tears," Mary said. "I guess there's just no way to brace yourself for it, even though you know what's happening.

"Anything can trigger where it can almost send you all the way back. It doesn't seem like 10 years. When you're hurting on almost a daily basis, it seems like eternity."

• • •

Nick Aliotti was asleep when the message was left on his answering machine early in the morning of Aug. 13. The news of Kelly's death makes as little sense to him now as it did when he first wondered whether the message was real or a terrible dream.

"Almost surreal," Aliotti said, remembering how UO offensive line coach Steve Greatwood broke the news. "A numbing feeling."

There are few people who find Kelly's life and legacy as important as Aliotti.

Oregon's longtime defensive coordinator grew up in the East Bay in Pittsburg, an hour from Richmond, and claimed the Bay Area as his primary recruiting ground for years before retiring in December.

After Kelly's death, Aliotti felt a responsibility to watch over the remaining 2004 De La Salle recruits — receiver Cameron Colvin, and defensive backs Jackie Bates and Willie Glasper — and T.J. Ward, who arrived from De La Salle a year later. A picture of Kelly sat on Aliotti's office desk until his retirement.

"Time heals all wounds but I'm not sure it heals them all completely," he said, remembering how he tried to bury his anguish in the day-to-day work of the 2004 season, with mixed results. "I know we were all walking around here in a fog or daze or cloud."

It was actually Aliotti's brother, Joe, a De La Salle coach and staff member since 1998, who knew Kelly the longest. But the year Nick Aliotti spent intensely recruiting Kelly proved transformative for both family and coach, a bond that was sealed with Kelly's death and the monthly phone calls it still spurs between the two.

"The day it happened I said, 'Man, Nick, they took my baby,'" said Landrin, voice cracking, before handing the phone to his wife, unable to finish a recent interview.

At Landrin's wish, Aliotti delivered the eulogy at Kelly's funeral in Richmond. Oregon delayed its first day of fall camp in 2004 so that head coach Mike Bellotti, Aliotti, the De La Salle recruits and a few others could attend before flying back to Eugene.

"It was one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in terms of a community coming together to honor a young man who'd made such an impression in such a short time," Bellotti said. "It was uplifting."

The request still makes Aliotti's voice, gravelly from 38 years in coaching, waver.

"Probably the most terrifying speech I ever had to give," he said. "I think no matter who it is, how do you do justice at someone's funeral? You're talking about a standup student. He's what you're looking for in a student athlete, happy, smiling. He really was. Usually I don't recruit a kid if I don't like him but this was a special kid. I got pretty close to the family. Landrin will call and say I love you, brother. (Shoot), that's pretty powerful."

Early on Aug. 13, Aliotti was one of many grasping for reasons why a respected teen shielded from violence — he was prohibited from riding public transportation to keep him away from a rougher crowd, and his father had moved to a safer part of Richmond his senior year — had been shot and killed anyway.

• • •

Hours earlier across the East Bay, Cameron Colvin was eating dinner when his godfather walked down a flight of stairs with a "crazy look on his face" and delivered what seemed like far-fetched news. Colvin sprang up to his room with the speed that made him one of the nation's top prep receivers in 2004, the headliner of the De La Salle teammates.

In Colvin's room he found his phone and more than 40 missed calls. He remembers confusion, not conversation.

"I called T.J. (Ward) and he was crying hysterically," said Colvin, who joins Ward in having a tattoo memorializing Kelly. "I called Jackie Bates and he said he was out in Richmond to see Terrance's grandmother. I heard his grandmother in the background screaming."

Kelly's grandmother, Bevelyn, helped raise her grandson since he was 18 months old, and their deaths, like their lives, would be intertwined. Bevelyn collapsed after hearing of her grandson's shooting, and she passed away two months later. Landrin Kelly, without his son or mother, went back to work as a district manager for a cleaning supply company. But every new store he visited brought new well-wishers, a rush of grief Mary Kelly said was too much to handle, even with medication. He hasn't worked in nearly nine years. The foundation, operated almost entirely out of a bedroom filled with Kelly's jerseys, scholarship offers and photos, is the father's outlet.

Closure has proved fleeting, like a series of promising four-yard gains punctuated by a demoralizing sack.

In 2007, Darren Pratcher was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 50 years to life for the killing. Pratcher was 15 at the time of the shooting. His defense stated he suffered from post-traumatic stress from growing up near Richmond's Iron Triangle neighborhood and believed he was shooting at a different man. After five days a jury sided with the prosecution's account instead, that the killing was planned after Pratcher had felt embarrassed by Kelly on a basketball court, and exhibited "a great deal of coldness."

Pratcher is serving his sentence at the Salinas Valley State Prison in Soledad, Calif.

"Fifty-to-life didn't do anything for me," said Glasper, whose lifelong goal of being in law enforcement was emboldened by Kelly's death. He's training to be a police officer in Pittsburg, with an aim on a future as a district attorney.

Added Mary Kelly, who had known Terrance since he was 4: "His parents can still go see him if they want to. I'm glad they gave them that time, but it still doesn't mean Terrance will come back. I don't think there's anything that they could have given him that would make me feel any better about the situation."

• • •

Once the car arrived at the edge of Richmond's Nicholl Park on July 26, and out stepped NFL star Marshawn Lynch, it didn't take long before the buzz sifted through the crowd of 400 and reached Mary and Landrin Kelly.

For the first time this year, the family celebrated "TK Day," an open event that burst with hundreds of foundation and family members, police officers and public officials.

The appearance of Lynch — who grew up in Oakland, knew of Kelly and also graduated in 2004 before an All-Pro NFL career in Seattle — was unannounced, however. So was his speech to 150 kids with rapt attention.

Without planning it, Lynch's speech about finding a constructive avenue out of danger was the exact kind of gesture the Kellys dream will generate a buzz for the future generation.

Too often, friends and family say, they internalized their emotions and wondered whether Kelly's story still resonated outside of Richmond. College football's cycle demanded Oregon, after dedicating part of its 2004 season to the family, move on to prepare for the next game, and recruit the next class. The last of the De La Salle recruits left in 2009.

Farther south, it can feel like Kelly's friends and family are stuck in a time warp. Kelly's death was the where-were-you-when? moment of their lives, one they still find themselves living in.

The day of Kelly's death, Colvin made plans with him and the other future Ducks to work out at their high school with UO receiver and former De La Salle star Demetrius Williams. Kelly didn't show.

"That whole day was a bad feeling," Glasper said.

If Kelly had worked out with the friends, Colvin believes, the group would have gone out afterward together for one last night before college.

"You always play that game of what could have been," said Colvin, who now is the CEO of his own real estate development company, Rise Above Enterprises. "The night Terrance got killed I was supposed to be with him."

Glasper and Colvin say their once-touted careers never fully escaped the shadow Kelly's death created. When they watch Ward playing in the NFL as Denver's starting safety, they — and Aliotti — believe the 6-foot-1, 220-pound Kelly could also be playing professionally, too.

"That's why it's hard at Oregon knowing what could have been and what's not because of a senseless act," Glasper said. "The entire time at Oregon, I still had that feeling of like, where's Terrance? I never got used to the fact that he wasn't up there. His father would come to the games, and the entire time we were up there, he was supposed to be there. It didn't feel right. It was never a time we felt like we moved on. Even when we hung out at Oregon, we still talked about him."

The hope is that many more will soon talk about Kelly, thanks to "When The Game Stands Tall," a feature film re-telling of author Neil Hayes' book by the same name.

The movie, which debuts Aug. 22, is a bittersweet moment for many who have attempted to reconcile Kelly's death for a decade only to now see him re-imagined.

Their greatest fear was that Kelly's story would be twisted to fit a Hollywood narrative rather than fit their own memories that have stuck with them, day and night, for the last 10 years. Colvin and Mary Kelly say the film, though it alters some dates for dramatic effect, didn't misrepresent Kelly.

"They showed his true character with being the leader he was," she said, and it's a quality she hopes she's showing with the foundation in his memory.

The Terrance Kelly Youth Foundation sponsors boys and girls from kindergarten through high school, and teaches literacy, nutrition, anger management, non-violent conflict resolution. It's also taught the adults that their energy remains best spent attempting to broker change in a city that has seen crime fall but still remains one of America's most dangerous cities.

Sixteen people died via homicide in Richmond in 2013, its lowest total in 33 years. There were 8,070 violent or property crimes committed in Richmond in 2004, a number that fell to 5,464 last year.

In the foundation, Landrin leads about 30 boys — those aged 12-17 are taken on the scared-straight tour — and Mary close to 30 girls, even turning down a promotion to manage her Home Depot store to spend more time with the program.

The foundation will hold its 10th annual scholarship dinner and gala Aug. 23 at De La Salle, and for the 10th time, Bellotti, Aliotti and a small circle of Eugene residents will sponsor a table. Bates, Colvin, Glasper and Ward all have helped in their own ways, whether calling Landrin or stopping by the house.

"We teach them the value of life and living and being a leader," Landrin said. "We help people overcome their situation in the neighborhood, a neighborhood that will determine who they are and who they will be."

• • •

As the movie's premiere inches closer, the commercials previewing it play more often.

They depict Kelly's death, a united team and a coach — Jim Caviezel plays the real-life Bob Ladouceur — who inspires. Invariably, the Kellys' 8-year-old grandson, Emaure, runs into the room alerting the family, and calls and text messages flood Landrin's phone, all asking the same thing — did you see that?

Braced by repetition, the Kellys try not to let these moments get them like they used to.

"We're excited, but we're also stunned," Mary said. "There's an excitement in the community, but at the same time it just scratches these wounds and opens them up. I'm happy for the movie, though. Maybe they'll see the movie and ask questions and wonder about the family. They'll see we're in the community trying to help kids.

"The true goal is to keep him alive and keep his lesson alive because he was a leader. He made a big impact in the community. He was a ray of sunshine."

The instinct is to weep after the commercials. But the second instinct is to teach, and they say they've found a most captive audience — and spitting image of Terrance — in Emaure, who wears Terrance's number and talks like him, too. On Dec. 2, 2007 -- what would have been Kelly's senior day at Oregon -- Landrin emerged from Autzen Stadium's tunnel carrying a jersey and Emaure.

The overheard conversations between Landrin and Emaure bring Mary back to 2004, for a happier reason.

"That sounds like Terrance," Mary says. "Others say, 'That's Terrance coming through him.' "

It doesn't matter that Landrin and Mary have already told Emaure almost everything there is about his "uncle TK," or that he's seen the room filled with the De La Salle memories, their green-and-silver tint slowly fading. He wants to know more about Terrance, and he is in luck: The Kellys have stories to tell.

-- Andrew Greif | @andrewgreif