Asheville woke up differently on Mother’s Day. The kind of news that spreads through a tight community like a cold wind came quietly at first, through a comment here, a post there, and then all at once it was undeniable.
Rorey Hipps, known to many simply as a face that lit up the room the moment he walked in, was gone. No warning. No chance to say goodbye.
Just the sudden, gutting reality that someone who had been a fixture of this city for years would no longer be standing behind the bar at Barksdale or carving down Haywood on his board.
Rorey was many things to many people. To the skateboarding community, he was a staple of PUSH Skateshop, a talented rider who could be spotted rolling through the streets of Asheville on any given afternoon.
To regulars at Barksdale, he was the bartender who made sure you felt welcome the moment you walked through the door. To friends who had known him for over a decade, he was simply one of the realest people they had ever met.
Clyde Singleton, who moved to Asheville in 2012, described Rorey as someone who made sure he was always good from the start and remained solid through his last visit in 2024. “That cloth Rorey was built from, they don’t make them no more,” he wrote, and few who knew Rorey would argue with that.
A Presence That Could Not Be Faked
What people keep coming back to when they talk about Rorey is not any single moment or achievement but the feeling of being around him. He smiled easily. He gave his energy freely. He showed up for people without needing to be asked.
Those qualities are rarer than most people admit, and Asheville felt their weight the moment he was gone. One person remembered spotting him skateboarding down Haywood just two weeks before his passing and not thinking twice about it, because that was just Rorey being Rorey.
Another wrote simply, “Love you Rorey. Gonna miss you.” Short words, but they carried everything.
He had also recently taken a trip to Tampa with the shop crew just a couple of months before his death, making memories with people who had known him since he was young.
Atreauspath, who joined that trip, summed up what so many were feeling when he said he had known Rorey since he was a little kid and that you just never know. Life is precious, and Rorey seemed to understand that instinctively in the way he lived it.
A Community Rallying Around His Family
In the days following his death, Asheville did what communities do when they lose someone who gave so much of himself. People gathered online and in spirit to support his family.
A GoFundMe organized by Linden Lisska was set up to help his mother, Traci, and sister Kristen with funeral expenses, travel costs, and to give them space to grieve without the added burden of financial stress.
Within hours, hundreds of people contributed, with donations pushing past eighteen thousand dollars toward a thirty thousand dollar goal. Angela Hipps, a relative of Rorey’s father, Kevin, shared the fundraiser widely and asked people to keep the whole family in their thoughts.
Rorey’s mama, Traci, was known for saying she loved her kids to the moon and beyond, and those who donated wanted to make sure that love was returned to her during the hardest days of her life.
Asheville has lost one of its own, and the hole he leaves is real. But the outpouring makes one thing clear. Rorey Hipps mattered. Deeply, genuinely, and to more people than he probably ever knew.
