Margus Morrison, a 'jokester' who loved to smile, celebrated at service

They share a May 27 birthday, but on Friday it also became the date they laid to rest their father and son, Margus Morrison, one of 10 victims of the Tops mass shooting.

“I teach my kids to be happy no matter what, so I put the happiness in her life, so I hope she’s not too sad and not too upset, but I had to explain to her, ‘You have to spend your birthday memorializing your father on his funeral,’ " said Raasha Thompson, Ramarianna’s mother.

About 200 people attended Margus Morrison's funeral Friday at True Bethel Baptist Church on East Ferry Street.

“We need to support that child. We need to make sure that she has a good life,” Mayor Byron W. Brown said of Ramarianna. “Her father was taken away from her. The entire community needs to support this family in making sure all of these young people that have lost parents and grandparents are able to do well in spite of this pain that they have experienced that will probably never leave them.”

The 52-year-old Margus Morrison on May 14 was shopping at Tops Markets on Jefferson Avenue and had planned to come to his mother’s home afterward and also visit three of his children at their mother’s home.

“He texted me that day, about 11:43 a.m., and told me he was going to come by and bring something for the kids. And that was the last time we spoke, through a text,” said Thompson, who has two other children with Morrison – Tayenna, 11, and Makhai, 13.

A father of six children, Morrison graduated from Bennett High School in 1990. He had worked since 2019 as an afternoon school bus aide for Buffalo Public School's Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center No. 99.

He loved to take quiet walks. He was a diehard Buffalo Bills fan who loved to watch movies.

He also enjoyed playing basketball with family and friends.

“I don’t know if he was any good, but he enjoyed it,” joked the Rev. Darius Pridgen, who delivered the eulogy.

Morrison was remembered as a good father and a prankster, who smiled easily and was full of life.

“He loved just laughing,” said Pridgen, who would see Morrison in the community and also while shopping at the Tops grocery store where a self-described white supremacist shot and killed Morrison and nine others. “The smile was always there.”

“He was a jokester,” said family friend Renita Ismalia. “He used to pull pranks on me. He used to tell me, ‘Oh, your whole dress is ripped in the back.’ Then he’d start laughing or he’d say, ‘It’s a bug on you’ because he knows I don’t like bugs. And then I turn around, and there’s not. Or he’d throw some leaves on me and make it feel like something was crawling on me.”

Morrison also gave back to the community, said Murray Holman, executive director of the Stop the Violence Coalition and a member of Buffalo Peacemakers. Holman often directed some young men to Morrison for counseling, “to hear the knowledge that he had,” Hollman said.

“A lot of brothers don’t know that the (older men) can give us a lot of information,” Hollman said. “He was humble, kind, honest and a man that wanted to talk to our youth to give them good direction – a peacemaker.”

Other guests at the funeral included the Rev. Al Sharpton, founder and president of the National Action Network; civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump; Rep. Brian Higgins; NAACP Buffalo Branch President Mark Blue; Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes; state Sen. Tim Kennedy; and Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia.