Conway firefighter Chris Ray mourned, honored at funeral services: 'Everyone goes home'

Mourners gathered from across Horry County, the state, and the nation to celebrate the life of Conway firefighter Christopher Gene Ray who was killed Sunday in the line of duty.

“Everyone Goes Home,” read the logo painted in gold across Myrtle Beach fire engines that streamed into Beach Church parking lot, joining numerous fire and police vehicles that dotted the landscape.

That’s where hundreds of Ray’s family members, friends and colleagues gathered to bid farewell to the 42-year old firefighter with an uplifting service to send him home to meet his maker.

“To be absent from the body, is to be present with the Lord,” Chaplain John Wayne Tyler told the funeral congregation of nearly 700.

“It seems like this would be the end, but it’s not to a Christian — it is just the beginning,” Tyler said.

Ray was killed in what the fire chief described as a “tragic accident” as his truck responded to a house fire just blocks from the Ninth Avenue station. Ray fell from the back of a fire engine and was then struck as it reversed down a nearby street from the Hickory Circle blaze.

Conway Fire Chief Le Hendrick Jr. said in his remarks prior to the eulogy that Ray’s goal when he awoke every morning was to make someone smile, and Ray boldly told him once that he didn’t smile enough.

Hendrick didn’t hold back on smiling as he shared stories about Ray’s clever sense of humor, his confidence as a firefighter protecting his community, Ray’s devotion to God, and his dedication to his family.

Ray was a country boy, a burly man who was also a “teddy bear,” a loyal Gamecocks fan, a man who would want those mourning for him that day to celebrate his life by sharing a joke.

“He had a life story for everything,” Hendrick said. “His perspective in life was different than mine, and that made us closer.”

Ray was a man who had chosen a dangerous life as a firefighter, and paid the ultimate price. Yet in his six years with the Conway Fire Department, he also gained a new family that Hendrick said would always be there for Ray’s family that he left behind.

“We’re a band of brothers and sisters with a bond that is indescribable,” Hendrick said.

Fire trucks from Charleston, Columbia, Lake City, Mullins and Georgetown were part of the procession lined with 70 emergency response vehicles that joined Conway and other local engines after the service for the hour-long procession. The motorcade traveled from Myrtle Beach along S.C. 22 and other highways to reach Ray’s tiny community of Green Sea, where he was buried at Buffkin Cemetery.

Neighbors watched by the roadside as the nearly mile-long procession filed into a vacant farm field beside the tiny cemetery down the street from his home, where gravestones date back a century.

“There’s a lot of people who loved him like we did,” said Ray’s neighbor, Charlene Srickland, as ladder trucks rolled by her through the dusty field.

Strickland recalled when Ray was just a child, he would carry her groceries for her at Hill’s supermarket in Tabor City, N.C., and when he became a man, he cut her meat for her at the BI-LO in Conway.

That was before Ray became a firefighter, when he still ran with the motorcycle club that kept pace within the motorcade, between police cars and fire engines, and whose members clad in leather paid their respects graveside, among a hundred men and women in formal fire and police uniforms.

A lone bagpiper led the outdoor service and prayer, and a bugler played Taps as an honor guard carefully folded the American flag that draped Ray’s coffin and presented it to his wife, Brandi Ray.

An emergency tone sounded through the graveyard, issued by a dispatcher who called Ray’s number over a scanner that was relayed from a nearby speaker.

The dispatcher called for Ray several times, but the answer was only static, and silence.

“Firefighter Ray has responded to his last alarm,” the dispatcher said.

Ray is survived by his mother, Sarah Logan of Florida; his wife, Brandi Ray of Green Sea; daughters, Cheyenne Ray of Tabor City, N.C., and Reagan Ray of Green Sea; stepson, Troy Phipps of Green Sea; brothers, Dicky Ray and Davey Ray, both of Tabor City, N.C.; and his paternal grandmother, Bernice Ray of Tabor City, N.C.

Ray, a North Carolina native, was also a volunteer with the Horry County Fire Rescue Station 6 and 41.

Contributions can be made to the family through the South Carolina’s Firefighters Foundations.

This story was originally published March 24, 2016 at 1:09 AM with the headline "Conway firefighter Chris Ray mourned, honored at funeral services: 'Everyone goes home'."