OPA comments on Gavin meeting, Tiffany Knupp fires back

Ocean Pines Association officials said they were stunned this week after Tiffany Knupp, whose son, Gavin, was killed in a hit-and-run accident in July, publicly and angrily rejected an offer by two board members to honor her son with an annual award in his name.

According to a statement issued Wednesday by the OPA, Association President Doug Parks and board member Collette Horn emerged from a private meeting with Knupp on Monday believing they had agreed on how Gavin would be remembered in the community.

Instead, the statement continued, Knupp posted a commentary on social media that suggested board members were being influenced by gifts from the Yacht Club restaurant operators and telling them to “Please kindly take the meaningless award and shove it up your asses.”

However, Tiffany Knupp said the press release omitted quite a bit of pertinent information, including that the idea to rename the skate park in her son’s memory came not from her, but Ocean Pines General Manager John Viola.

“Before this meeting, I had a couple of meetings (with the OPA), first with (OPA President) Doug (Parks) and (director) Rick Farr, then with the GM (John Viola),” she said. “This all started because I reached out to John to do a fundraiser for the skate park. We talked and I told him we wanted to give back to the community and he said, wouldn’t it be amazing if they could rename the park or put a (dedicated) bench there? It was never our idea in the first place. He suggested it. We then started the whole process. He runs it by some people, calls me back a couple of days later, says they could push this through.”

Furthermore, this was the impetus for the founding of the Gavin Knupp Foundation. Tiffany Knupp said that Viola asked her if they had a foundation, explaining that they needed one for fundraising.

“That’s how it started,” she said. “To get funds to support the skate park and it kind of grew from there.”

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