St. Stanislaus basketball standout adopted by Bay St. Louis family following death of older son

By Wallace Lee/Contributing Writer

Max Baria is one of the best high school basketball players in Mississippi, a 6-foot-8 St. Stanislaus star who is currently deciding where he’s going to play in college.

But to his parents, David and Marcie, he’s been their salvation. Max was adopted at birth in 2008, nearly three years after the sudden death of their older son, Darden.

“We went through something terrible that nobody should ever have to go through,” David says. “But out of this terrible thing, something really beautiful happened. And for me, Max is the best proof I’ve ever seen that there’s a God who doesn’t want people to suffer.”

Twenty years ago, David and Marcie Baria ran a successful law practice in Bay St. Louis. They shared a beautiful home in Waveland with their three children, daughters Merritt and Bess and son Darden.

Like many families on the Coast, they lost their home and most of their possessions when Hurricane Katrina hit in late August 2005. Less than a month later, an even bigger tragedy struck the Baria family.

Ten-year-old Darden began complaining of headaches and was having trouble with simple tasks such as walking and putting on his shoes. His fever spiked to 106 degrees, and he was admitted to University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Marcie’s hometown and where the family had temporarily relocated after the storm.

Darden fell into a coma and died a week later, on Sept. 27, 2005. Doctors had initially diagnosed him with a “fever virus,” but soon determined that his death had been caused by rabies.

David Baria said doctors told him that Darden was the only person in the United States to die from rabies in 2005 and the first in the state of Mississippi since 1948. How exactly he came to be infected remains a mystery, Marcie says.

“The CDC told us that, most likely, he’d been bitten in the head at night, and that’s why he didn’t know he’d been bitten,” she says. Because Darden and his family were not immediately aware he’d been bitten, they did not rush him to the hospital for treatment as is common when someone suspects they might have been infected with rabies.

Though they were by then in their 40s, David and Marcie began discussing having another child soon after Darden’s death. Marcie admitted she was “a wreck” at the time, and David urged her to “get better” before they had another child.

“I said, ‘you’ve got it backwards,’ she remembers, “’Because once the other child is here, I will be better.”

Medical issues prevented them from conceiving naturally, so they looked into adoption. Based on the recommendation of a family friend who had also adopted, they signed up with an agency.

Nine months passed, and they’d had no luck finding a baby to join their family. Marcie called the adoption agency.

“And I talked to her, and she said, ‘Well, it just takes a long time. It takes a long time to get a white baby,’” Marcie said. “And I said, ‘Well, we didn’t say that.’”

That’s the other thing about Max — he’s Black. His birth mother, an Ohio native who was then a student at the University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Park campus in Long Beach, already had an 18-month-old daughter and was concerned she wouldn’t be able to care for two children and stay in school.

David, who grew up in Jackson County and served three terms in the Mississippi legislature, describes himself and his wife as “really white.” And he admits to getting some strange looks from time-to-time from people who don’t know Max’s story.

But once the Barias saw Max for the first time, any qualms they might have about being a mixed-race family disappeared immediately. It was May 30, 2008.

“He opened his eyes and we said, ‘look at those eyes,’” Marcie recalls. “And so then he came home with us.”

Still, the fact that Max looks different than his parents and older sisters would be obvious to anyone, even if he wasn’t nearly a foot taller than David. Max began to notice his distinct skin color when he was about two, and David remembers having several conversations with him when he was still a young boy.

“We started talking about skin color because clearly we’re, like, really white,” David says. “There’s no faking it, you know. And Max started to notice that his skin color was different than ours, and I said, ‘Look, man, it’s just skin.’”

David still tears up telling the story, so Marcie continued.

“We were watching football, and Max said something (about a player) like, ‘whoop, he’s the same color as me. What color is he?’” Marcie recalled. “And David said, ‘olive.’ And Max had a little speech impediment when he was little, and he said, so he started going on saying, ‘I’m ‘ah-biv.’”

The family returned to the Coast shortly after Katrina and now lives in Bay St. Louis. Though he’s no longer in politics, David still practices law. Marcie is retired.

Once he started going to school, Max started to realized his family situation wasn’t necessarily a common one. But he took it in stride.

“I had two parents who were loving to me, and I was grateful for that,” he says. “And all my friends kind of knew, and I knew. They always put me in good education in private schools growing up, so I always had a good group of friends and everything. So it didn’t really affect me too much.”

The Baria’s also quickly noticed that Max was extraordinarily tall for his age. His pediatricians consistently projected that he would stand between 6-foot-7 and 6-foot-10 as an adult.

Max was 13 or 14 when he surpassed David, who is 5-10, in height. It was around Christmas of 2022 the last time the two saw literally eye-to-eye.

Though he excelled at soccer and baseball growing up, Max eventually gravitated toward basketball. The high school soccer and basketball seasons run simultaneously in Mississippi, so he was forced to choose between them.

“I was more of a baseball and soccer player actually growing up, and I was pretty good at soccer,” Max says. “But I always played basketball too. And then when I got to St. Stanislaus, obviously you couldn’t play soccer and basketball at the same time. And I was the tallest one there, so I thought I’d stick with basketball and see how it went.”

It’s gone pretty well. Max averaged 17 points and 11 rebounds for the Rock-a-Chaws as a junior in 2024-25, and prior to this season was chosen to the prestigious Clarion-Ledger “Dandy Dozen” list of the top 12 high school basketball players in the state.

St. Stanislaus is off to its best start in recent memory, 12-1 after taking its first loss by a 53-48 score last Friday night at Metairie Park (La.) Country Day. Max had 15 points and six rebounds in that game, after putting up 14 and eight in a 39-36 victory over Biloxi in the Dec. 15 “War on the Shore” at St. Stanislaus — the Rock-a-Chaws’ first win over the Indians in 14 years.

“It’s been awesome,” Max says.

St. Stanislaus won its only basketball state championship in 2011, going 34-2. Daniel Grieves was the star of that team, and is now the Rock-a-Chaws’ head coach.

Max has begun to receive interest from numerous basketball programs at the next level, and currently has junior-college scholarship offers from Jones College, Mississippi Gulf Coast, Southwest Mississippi, Holmes and Itawamba. He said he’s still deciding on where he’ll play in the future.

Older sisters Merritt and Bess are now in their late 20s; Merritt lives in New York, Bess in Oxford (Darden would have turned 31 on Dec. 20). Max’s basketball career is going to take him some undetermined distance from home, so it won’t be long before the Barias are empty-nesters.

But they’re still thankful every day that Max came into their life.

“I didn’t know if you’re going to just inevitably feel differently about your adopted child versus your natural children,” Marcie says. “And we don’t feel any different. I mean, there’s no ‘loving them more.’ Because it’s just been better than I could have ever imagined. I mean, he’s just been a sweet child, and he’s smart, and he’s athletic. He’s just a great kid.

“And so it’s been just a wonder in my life every day. … We just feel very blessed. And I don’t know what I’m going to do when he leaves me next year.”