Group works to construct playground to honor slain teen

<p>Construction began Wednesday on a playground dedicated to slain Livingston teen Brendan Tevlin.</p>

News 12 Staff

Sep 26, 2018, 9:07 PM

Updated 2,210 days ago

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Construction began Wednesday on a playground dedicated to slain Livingston teen Brendan Tevlin.
The playground will be built in Jacobsen Park in Lavallette, one of Brendan’s favorite Jersey Shore destinations, according to his family.
Volunteers from the group Where Angels Play are building the playground. The group was founded after Superstorm Sandy and the Sandy Hook school shooting. They build playgrounds to honor and remember lives lost in tragedies.
"Brendan really touched a lot of lives. He was just a really special person. All these people here; it’s amazing. It’s really a beautiful thing. It’s hard to put into words,” says Brendan’s mother Allison Tevlin.
Brendan’s father Mike Tevlin says that his son loved everything about the beach.
“Brendan would spend the summers down here. He loved everything about Lavallette. He was a surfer. We’d spend most of our time on the beach. But as a kid, Brendan would spend his evenings down here at the playgrounds,” Mike Tevlin says.
Where Angels Play founder Bill Lavin knew Brendan’s grandfather. The organization offered to build its 49th playground in his name.
“An opportunity to see kind of the blessed isde of life and watch the very best of humanity come together in the wake of some tragedy,” Lavin says.
About 100 volunteers will work around the clock to finish construction on the playground so that it si complete in time for the grand opening this Sunday.
Brendan Tevlin was shot and killed June 25, 2014 while he was stopped in his car at a red light in West Orange. Tevlin's killer, Ali Muhammad Brown, is currently serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole. Brown said that he killed Tevlin, as well as other people in Seattle, as punishment against the United States for the treatment of people in the Middle East.