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Murieta S. Covington, J.D. ’04, achieved a lifelong dream when she graduated with a law degree from IU McKinney School of Law.

Her son, Brian R. Prince II, J.D. J.D. ’15, is honoring her legacy through a scholarship he established at IU McKinney Law in 2022.

“She has always been my inspiration,” says Prince.

Covington was born in San Francisco, California and spent her childhood between San Francisco and Birmingham, Alabama. When she moved to Indianapolis with her husband and children—including Prince—she worked as a paralegal for Baker & Daniels and earned her undergraduate degree at IUPUI before being named one of the state’s first Indiana Conference for Legal Education Opportunity (ICLEO) Fellows.

She managed to raise three sons, continue working, earn an undergraduate degree at IUPUI and graduate from law school. When Covington (in the photo at left) graduated, she landed a job as counsel for Ingersoll Rand in Carmel, Indiana, where she worked until 2014. She was pursuing an LL.M. in intellectual property law through John Marshall Law School when she died in her sleep in 2016 at age 50.

Her death was a shock to Prince. They spoke on the phone every day and had shared difficult times when he was young, and his mother was newly divorced in San Francisco. They had also happy many times, including their 2004 graduations—Prince’s from high school, and Covington’s from law school. They danced at Prince’s wedding and celebrated the birth of his first child.

Prince credits her with his success despite his rocky academic start. Although he had worked hard to get into law school, Prince was ready to quit after his first 1L semester. His mother set him straight. “She told me, ‘If I could go to law school, raise a family and work, you can figure this out. I did not raise a quitter,’” Prince recalls.

Prince did not quit. Like his mother, he was an ICLEO Fellow and took courses taught by some of the same professors, and developed relationships with Professors Florence Roisman, Larry Jegen, and Frank Sullivan. He received the Sidney D. Eskenazi Scholarship and focused his energies on gaining legal experience, first at Thomas Law Group and then as an extern at the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, where he gained a vast knowledge of development-related tax credits.

After an internship at Flaherty & Collins, Prince was off and running. Now vice president of development at the commercial real estate firm, Prince is responsible for site selection for mixed-use multifamily opportunities across the country. He has parlayed his understanding of public-private partnership projects into urban infill developments that have helped transform communities in Elkhart, Mishawaka, Michigan City and Florida.

“I love it—the more complicated, the better,” he says. “It is a joy, to overcome environmental challenges of a place and tell a story about what something used to be and what it can be.”

Soon after his mother’s death, Prince reached out to IU McKinney Law administrators with the idea of creating a scholarship, but it took several more years for Prince—who is still repaying his own law school loans—to raise the funds to endow the Murieta S. Covington Memorial Scholarship.

The scholarship will be awarded to J.D. students with special consideration given to students of underrepresented populations or students with diverse cultural experiences, with a preference for Black students who have at least one dependent. Prince hopes to develop a mentoring relationship with recipients to further honor his own mentor—his mother.

“My end game is not just my own personal success, but to help develop a blueprint for others to succeed,” he says. “That’s my mother’s legacy, too.”