Kevin Glaudin, 26, law clerk from Roosevelt, dies of brain cancer

Law clerk Kevin Glaudin started mapping out his future as an attorney at age 9, when he dressed in a suit and carried an old briefcase for career day at school.

In picking a law school, he set aside his mother’s pleas to take the full scholarship to a local school, confident he could get into a top law school, join a top law firm’s real estate division, start building toward a partnership after nine years and take on social justice causes on the side.

“I’m going to bet on myself,” he said, leaving his home in 2019 to attend the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law in Los Angeles.

Glaudin, of Roosevelt, was 26 when he died April 1 of brain cancer.

He graduated from USC  last May, and had been hired by a global law firm, Ropes & Gray in Manhattan,  for its real estate division — as he'd planned.

Still thinking about his future during his last months at home fighting cancer, Glaudin had refused to take pain relief medicine, according to his mother, Margarett Alexandre, of Roosevelt.

"'They’re going to do drug tests,’” she recalled him saying. “In his head, he still had to go to work, and he didn’t want anything to interfere with his integrity.”

“He was a very determined, focused young man who knew what he wanted and worked to make it happen," she added. "He was what I would call a quiet storm. His brain was working all the time: ‘What’s the next plan?’ ”

Socially minded, Glaudin was in high school when he starting going to Haiti on health and educational ventures as part of his mother’s nonprofit, Mission Grandbois, named after his grandfather’s village. He served as translator for Haitian Creole speakers, organized a children’s camp, created Facebook pages for the young, and documented the trip with videos. In one enterprise, called Kids for Kids, he and his mother interviewed and selected children who would be given goats to raise as income and food for their families.

Those who knew Glaudin said he celebrated his supporters whenever he got good grades or career advances.

“If you complimented him, he didn’t make a big deal about it,” said Judah Herskovits of Long Island City, Queens, who was a year ahead of Glaudin at USC. “In getting something, he was just thinking of, ‘Who helped me along the way? Who am I grateful to?’ ”

During the pandemic, Glaudin supported friends facing challenges imposed by the disruptions to daily life.

Irving Rabel of Wheatley Heights recalled how impossible it was to get the new PlayStation 5 during the pandemic until his friend came to the rescue: “One day, Kevin, knowing how bad I wanted one, just showed up at my doorstep with one because he bought two … That's the kind of man he was, just a very selfless person.”

One of Glaudin’s favorite roles was godfather to his cousin’s son, Atticus Myrthil, 2, calling the boy “my guy.” The two phoned each other daily, and a key part of the young man’s life plan was to see his godson grow up.

But he felt increasingly sick in late 2021. He refused to fly home until he finished exams, his mother said. At one point, she said, she watched him on FaceTime for eight hours straight in case of emergency. Two days before Christmas, doctors removed as much of the tumor as possible.

Glaudin got his law degree in May and planned to tackle the bar exam again. He had failed in his first attempt, taking no consolation about going to cancer treatments the morning of the exam and still falling only eight points short of passing, his mother said.

Then brain cancer returned late last year.

“He had already impressed colleagues with his enthusiasm, responsiveness and eagerness to jump in and help,” according to a Ropes & Gray statement. “His smile in our hallways was a signature. We feel the loss of a young lawyer with such tremendous potential who we had hoped to work with for many years to come.”

Alexandre remembered how her son embraced her “shenanigans” one last time during Christmas.

“I said, ‘Kevin, you’re my greatest gift.’ ” the mother recounted. “I wanted him wrapped in Christmas wrapping.”

Laughing, he let her swathe him in snowflake wrap until only his face showed.

Besides his mother, Glaudin is survived by his sister, Katrina Moose of Roosevelt, his father, Fresnell Glaudin of Weston, Florida, and godson, Atticus of Valley Stream.

Visiting hours are 4 to 8 p.m. Friday at the Hartnett Funeral Home in Uniondale. A funeral Mass will be celebrated 10 a.m. Saturday at St. Martha’s Roman Catholic Church in Uniondale, followed by cremation. Donations in lieu of flowers may be made to Mission Grandbois.