James Owens Jr. was 20 years old, a junior defensive lineman for the Huntingdon Hawks, and a young man who had in the days before his death been baptized.
That detail, reported by People, is the one that stays. Not the football statistics, not the position he played, but the fact that he had made a declaration of faith only days before a head-on collision on U.S. 82 in Chilton County, Alabama, took his life in the early morning hours of November 10, 2025.
He was pronounced dead at the scene. He was 20 years old.
Who Was James Owens Jr.?
James Owens Jr. grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and went on to attend Huntingdon College in Montgomery, a small liberal arts school whose football program competes at the NCAA Division III level. He played defensive lineman at 6-foot-2 and approximately 235 pounds, and in his 2025 season before the crash, he had recorded 10 tackles across five games.
Those are the numbers. They are not the point.
The point, according to everyone who spoke about him after his death, was the person wearing the jersey. His coaches and teammates described someone whose character made a stronger impression than his play, a young man who represented his college with what Huntingdon itself called “respect, integrity and kindness both on and off the field.”
The Crash
At approximately 5:35 a.m. on November 10, 2025, a 2019 Chevrolet Camaro and a 2016 Toyota Tundra were involved in a head-on collision on U.S. 82, approximately two miles west of Maplesville in Chilton County, Alabama.
James Owens Jr. was in one of those vehicles. Justin E. Carlee, 42, was in the other.
Both men were pronounced dead at the scene.
The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency’s Highway Patrol Division launched an investigation into the crash. As of the most recent available reporting, additional circumstances beyond the collision itself had not been publicly established.
“A Towering Presence of Kindness”
The language Huntingdon College used to describe James Owens Jr. after his death was specific and deliberate. They called him “a towering presence of kindness.” That phrase chosen carefully by an institution that had lost a student says more than a statistics sheet ever could.
Head coach Mike Turk spoke about the team’s effort to move forward in the way Owens would have wanted, while also acknowledging how much his players needed one another in the immediate aftermath of losing a teammate. Grief in a team setting is a particular kind of experience. It is felt collectively, in the spaces where someone used to be, at practice, in the locker room, on the sidelines.
His absence was felt in all of those places.
His Faith
Huntingdon College chaplain and dean of the chapel Rhett Butler remembered James Owens Jr. in terms that went beyond athletic achievement entirely.
Butler spoke about the baptism that had taken place only days before the crash, describing Owens as someone who stood out among those he had baptized because of how certain and assured he appeared in his faith. That is not language that gets used lightly by someone who has performed many baptisms. It is a specific observation about a specific person at a specific moment.
The timing of a young man choosing to be baptized days before his death is not something that can be made sense neatly. But it is part of who he was in the final chapter of his life, and it mattered to the people who knew him.
The Community’s Response
The loss extended beyond Huntingdon’s campus into Tuscaloosa, where James had grown up. The community that knew him as a young man before the football scholarship, before Montgomery, before college came together to honor him.
A balloon release was organized in Tuscaloosa, attended by people wearing Huntingdon’s colors. His funeral was held on November 22, 2025, at Christian Community Church in Tuscaloosa the city where his story began.
Both communities, the one he came from and the one he chose, showed up for him.
Conclusion
James Owens Jr. played five games in his 2025 season and recorded 10 tackles. He was 20 years old, a junior, and a young man described by the people who knew him most closely as defined by kindness, integrity, and faith.
He was baptized days before he died.
His coaches, his teammates, his hometown, and his college community all gathered in vigils, in services, in deliberate tribute to say the same thing: that the person mattered more than the player, and that the player was already worth remembering.
He was 20 years old, and he is worth remembering.
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