Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s Podcast Co-Host Reflects on the ‘Unfair’ Ending of His Life and Details Their Final Texts (Exclusive)

Malcolm-Jamal Warner‘s friend and fellow podcast co-host is still grappling with the news of his tragic death.

Journalist and professor Candace Kelley, who co-hosted the Not All Hood podcast with Warner, opens up to PEOPLE about her good friend, who died on July 20 after drowning in Costa Rica while on vacation with his family.

“He was just in the middle of everything,” Kelley tells PEOPLE of the 54-year-old actor. “The middle of his life, the middle of moving back into his home after dealing with a pipe burst, the middle of summer, work…”

“The incompletion just feels so unfair,” she adds, noting that he was also in the middle of planning their future podcast episodes.

Kelley had been in contact with Warner up until the day before the fatal incident.

“We’d been texting up until the day before,” she recalls of Warner. “He texted me from the plane to say he was tired, then sent off a five-paragraph email [about work.] I was like, ‘You’re heading off to Costa Rica and you want to talk business and the future? OK!’ We were texting every day while he was there until the day before, and then I was like, ‘Where did he go?'”

After learning the tragic news, Kelley says it hit her incredibly hard.

“We’d only recently talked about death because I’d take a bereavement class, and he wanted to know what I learned,” she says. “The ebb and flow of death is that you just don’t know when it happens. You’re never prepared.”

Despite grappling with the massive loss of her colleague, she still hopes to continue his mission of seeing different portrayals of Black people in the media.

“He really was on a mission in making sure that the tropes about the Black community are not continued,” she says.

Similarly to The Cosby Show, where Warner played Theo Huxtable, the middle child in an upper-middle-class Black family in New York in the ’80s, Warner wanted to continue seeing different types of Black lives in the media — which is the intention behind Not All Hood.

“We’d have these conversations because all the dramas on TV are about gangs and the streets and drugs and kingpins,” Kelley says. “But a lot of people don’t know that he often turned down a lot of parts in these types of shows. He’d say, ‘It’s good writing, but it’s not a good message.'”

She continues, “The podcast was a continuation of what he wanted to show, which is that we’re not all the same; here are some different facets of our lives… He really, really cared about carrying the torch that he had from The Cosby Show, and that torch was, ‘Remember how they see us and do not co-sign.'”

“Because we have options and can do better, we can change how we’re seen and really in that way change the course of humanity,” she adds.

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Looking ahead, Kelley plans to keep Warner’s legacy and impact alive.

She says their podcast will continue, but the first episode without Warner will be a tribute called “Malcolm Left the Mic On,” and will air Friday, July 25.

“We have a lineup of people from The Resident, and so Tori’s going to come on, Erika Alexander, different people, but it will mostly be people from the community because I have hundreds of people who just want to share what he meant to them. So we said, ‘Let’s open it up to callers,'” she explains.

Despite the hole left by his death, she says she’ll never forget about his talents, and his kindness as a human.

“In the Atlanta music scene, Malcolm was on fire and adored,” she says of the actor’s side gigs. “He would often bring music into discussions. It was an absolute passion that moved him. He performed every first Thursday at Buteco, a venue in Grant Park, with his band Biological Misfits. He’d play a mean bass, sing, and do poetry. I went on May 1, and it was amazing. It was a thing.”

Also amazing was the fact that child stardom never derailed him. Warner starred on the sitcom from 1984 to 1992 and was a teenager at the time, but Kelley says, “The shoe never fell.”

“His other biggest mission, besides his family, was just being a good person,” she adds. “He wanted to be remembered like that; he has said that, he just wants to be remembered as a good person, and by all accounts, he’s got that down. He really did. That was really sincere.”

Warner had previously expressed similar sentiments on the Hot & Bothered with Melyssa Ford podcast.

In his final interview on May 21, he admitted that he thought about his legacy “a lot.”

“There’s part of me that I will be able to leave this earth knowing — and people knowing — that I was a good person,” he remarked.

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Warner said his father once told him that people love him because of his career and success. However, his dad was most proud was that his son was a good person.

“I’m a good person because my dad’s a good person,” Warner gushed. “It is possible to walk through this world and, with all of the darkness in the world, it is possible to maintain your soul and be a good person.”