Unless you saw the coffin on the flatbed trailer in the lead, you might have thought the convoy of more than 200 trucks in central Missouri on Monday was a political statement of some kind.
But the long procession on Highway 54 from Eugene to Jefferson City was in honor of a 13-year-old named Dalton Frank who loved trucks and often told his uncle that he wanted to be part of a convoy someday.
The uncle, 33-year-old Carey Frank, led the way in his big, gleaming Peterbilt with the boy’s father beside him. The only message Carey and his fellow truckers were seeking to convey concerned bullying, which is what they say drove the eighth grader to take his own life on Feb. 14.
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“This is just about a 13-year-old boy who was bullied,” Carey told The Daily Beast “It has nothing to do with politics at all.”
He added, “It’s kind of like Truckers Against Bullying.”
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The boy also liked sports and hanging out with his friends and cousins. He was an active member of Future Farmers of America. He was a talented artist and often drew the big semis that were his abiding passion.
“He’s been around trucks his whole life,” Carey told The Daily Beast. “He lived and breathed it.”
He dreamed aloud of rolling along with a big, rumbling line of them.
“He’d alway say to me he wanted to be part of a convoy,” Carey recalled. “I said, ‘That’s not just something that happens every day.”
Carey noted that he himself had never seen a convoy in Missouri.
In the meantime, Dalton asked one of the men at Carey’s trucking company to teach him how to polish aluminum wheels.
“He said, ‘I’d like to start my own little business,’” Carey remembered. “He was quite the entrepreneur. A very hard worker.”
And, whatever he was doing, Darlton always seemed the happiest of kids, with a big, contagious smile.
“That’s how it was every day,” Carey recalled. “I don't know that I've ever seen him not smile.”
Carey told The Daily Beast that he did not want to go into detail about what happened to his nephew, but he did note that bullying is intensified by social media.
“Back when I was in school, if somebody started a rumor or something happened, you had six hours or so to squash it before the end of the day,” Carey said. ”And now, a confrontation happens, a click of a switch and it's viral. It's all over….They say it's gotten pretty bad."
Some insight comes from a “reason for signing” entry that Dalton’s paternal grandmother, Debbie Frank, made on an online petition seeking a discussion with the local school board about bullying after 13-year-old student there died by suicide in May.
“My grandson 13 Dalton Frank was bullied and slapped at school and went home to take his own life,” the grandmother wrote. “The school failed this wonderful young man. RIP Dalton.”
The Cole County R-V School District, which handles media inquiries for the school, did not respond to a Daily Beast request for comment.
The family had hoped to use the school grounds for Dalton’s sendoff but ended up using the Kempker Arena a short distance away. Carey began spreading the word among his fellow truckers on Tuesday, Feb. 15.
“By Tuesday night, I already had, you know, 30 to 40 trucks, not including my own,” he recalled. “And so I knew it was going to be pretty good.”
One trucker in West Memphis, Arkansas, who was unsure he would be able to attend, made a TikTok video.
“I don’t like bullies,” he said. “I don’t care who you are.”
He then reached for his CB radio microphone and made what he termed a “last call” to a victim of bullying who loved trucks and was the son of a trucker.
“Dalton Frank, you got your ears on? Dalton Frank, come on back, buddy. You got your ears on? Dalton Frank, his family, everyone connected to him, I am sending my prayers, my condolences... I know you do not know me, but once a trucker, always a trucker.”
After the funeral on Monday, more than 200 trucks were lined up in preparation for what was termed a “truckers’ tribute”—escorting Dalton’s remains for burial at Hawthorn Memorial Gardens in Jefferson City. The procession was in a state of deep grief as the coffin was set upon the back of his uncle’s flatbed.
“We got it all hooked up and ready to roll out,” Carey recalled. “There's a lot of tears shed.”
But Dalton’s smiling spirit seemed to assert itself as as the trucks began to roll past the thousands of people along the two dozen miles of the route, standing beside the road and atop every bluff and filling the side streets.
“About halfway through, it was all smiles and laughs,” Carey said. “Kids along the roads, they had their arms pumping, wanting to hear the horns.”
The truckers obliged and the air filled with a sound that was music to Dalton.
“I know he was smiling down on us,” Carey said. “He was with us for sure.”
What boy wouldn’t want to be in a convoy like that? A Missouri school other than Dalton’s later called Carey.
“They said their kids came to school talking about a convoy for a kid that was bullied,” Carey later told The Daily Beast. “And that’s what they’re going to talk about today. They’re going to talk about bullying.”
And that was exactly what Carey had hoped.
“If it did anything, I wanted to make a big impression on people to say, ‘Hey, you got to talk to kids about bullying. It’s getting out of control right now with the social media and everything.”
Carey figures that everybody can learn a lesson from the Truckers’ Tribute to the boy who always wanted to be in a convoy.
“This is proof that you can ask a community to come together to help,” Carey said.
