Friends are hoping that people will see that there was more to Shannon Morvant than how he died.Morvant was found Sunday, Dec. 19, dead in a car parked in a residential neighborhood southeast of Thibodaux. Authorities are still investigating what caused the death of the 19-year-old freshman from the Chackbay area.

Friends say Morvant, a 2004 graduate of Houma Christian School, decided to sleep off a night of drinking in a car parked in front of friend Blake Bergeron’s house on Ledet Drive.

Bergeron called 911 around 9:30 a.m., after finding his friend motionless and without a pulse.

According to Larry Weidel, spokesman for the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Department, the exact cause of death cannot be determined until toxicology tests are completed, but they suspect it was a combination of drugs and alcohol.

Two arrests have been made on drug and alcohol charges, Nicole Guidry, 20, and Timothy Ledet Jr., 23, and a third person, Hardy Ledet, turned himself in to police.

“To those of you who knew him, you feel as we do about him,” Rose Morvant, Shannon’s mother, said at his Dec. 22 funeral according to newspaper reports. “To those of you who have never met him, you have missed out on a special friend.”

Friends and family gathered at Victory Assembly of God Church in Vacherie to honor his memory. Morvant had made many friends over the years at Houma Christian School.

“There were a lot of people there,” Alicia Terracina, a close friend and Nicholls freshman from Schriever, said. “He would have been surprised at how many he touched because it was amazing how many people were there.”

Jonathon LaFleur is a family and consumer sciences junior from Thibodaux who played in the Houma Christian worship band with Morvant. He performed a song titled “No More Pain” at the funeral that he wrote after hearing about Morvant’s death.

“The song is supposed to be what he would tell us now,” LaFleur said.

Friends remember him as a jokester and a loyal friend.

“He was funny,” Terracina said. “He would always try to make you laugh.”

Chase Volet, a long time friend and Nicholls freshman from Houma, said, “We called him ‘shoeless’ because he was from Chackbay, and he always wore a black beanie. He even had it on at the funeral.”

Friends say Morvant had a love of fishing, hunting and the outdoors, and planned to major in agricultural business and animal science.

“They are making him sound like he was such a bad kid and all he did was drink and party,” Terracina said. “But he was not like that. School was very important to him.”

“The way the media has presented the whole story has made us very angry,” Volet said. “I was overseas when it happened and the only information I could get was from the Internet, and pretty much all the media spoke negatively about Shannon.”

“If you would just read the media and didn’t know Shannon you would think he just partied all the time and didn’t care about anything else,” Volet said.

Terracina agreed that the media has misrepresented Morvant and wanted to say, “He was a good kid, but he made a few mistakes, and it cost him his life.