Go deeper Andrew Solender It was hard not to be impressed by the ingenuity, the determination to try to make things work, even now. Cooper's family hopes to use his story to . No football means no video to show college recruiters. Kooper Davis, a football and basketball player then took a turn on the mike with Strickland, who plays football, wrestles, and runs track & field, set to close things up. Researchers and mental health professionals had come to the conclusion that, as David Brent, a University of Pittsburgh psychiatry professor, put it to me, One thing thats protective against it is connection to school and family and peers. (For example, yesterday can be changed to last week, and Portland, Ore. to Portland or here.), You cannot republish our photographs or illustrations without specific permission. If we could have them all week, this is the best place for them to be.. Kooper was born in Hobbs NM on August 9, 2003 and spent his childhood in Lovington before moving to Hobbs with his family, Father Justin Davis, Mother Heather Davis and his younger siblings, where he was an honors student, athlete and student leader. Heather came to the stage with Koopers sisters. No, they said. Travis Wade Collins passed away unexpectedly at his home on Sunday, February 26th 2023. It has, instead, been left largely up to parents to monitor their children for signs of declining mental health as they determine whether to allow their kids to return to college or summer camp, to have a friend over, to go to the mall. They should circulate less or will become vectors. You cant go to sporting events, you cant see your friends, you cant go to parties. In addition to the CDC reporton the rising share of visits to emergency rooms by teenagers in distress, a University of Wisconsin survey of more than 3,000 high school athletes during the summer found that more than two-thirds reported high levels of anxiety and depression, 37% higher than past studies. Lujan Grisham would announce that schools could reopen for all ages on Feb. 8, but at maximum 50% capacity, which meant only a couple of days per week, and under the condition that they would close if cases rose again. For student-athletes aspiring to play in college, junior year is key. It had happened while Heather was at the grocery store picking up baby formula and something for dinner. To avoid dense crowds, the band had held three performances, with several hundred people attending each. Meg Gleghorn, left, is a sophomore at Hobbs High School and has chosen to continue with remote learning, while many of her peers have opted to return to part-time in-person learning. Enter I know Ive still got another year, but time goes faster than you really think., He continued, I just believe we should be here at school and we should be here playing football. Hobbs High School Hobbs, NM Football. There were many kids in the audience, and some were wearing raspberry-colored shirts with Kooper 10 written on them. Almost every weekend, wed be back on near-empty highways, staying in near-empty motels, subsisting on endless takeout chicken sandwiches whenever we couldnt find an outdoor place for a meal. He was a straight-A student and the quarterback for the Hobbs high school football team. When youd see him smile, you didn't know what was going on under that mop of hair he had, he said. And Kooper was a great student of the quarterback position; he had the intangibles, his coaches said. And I want his happiness more than I want mine., Pastor Kinney spoke last. The weekends is where theyre getting it, said principal Rick Martinez. The schools in Denver City, population 5,000, had shut down amid the coronavirus lockdowns in the spring of 2020, but there wasnt really any question about whether the 1,700-student district would reopen schools in the fall. In August, they were allowed to hold practice sessions capped at nine players each not enough for a real practice, with offense running plays against defense, but better than the July sessions, which had been capped at five players. Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). But the start of the school year arrived, and there was no school. There would be no actual games. As the hot Southwestern summer dragged on, Kooper Davis and his teammates placed faith in that possibility. Our sons, now 16 and 13, have had fully remote learning in their Baltimore public schools for nearly a year now. Its okay to put our stories on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories. And Im willing to keep my teammate and classmates in line, minding whatever rules, just so I can be back here doing the stuff I love.. Definitive explanations were, of course, impossible to come by. Thank you for your interest in republishing this story. Texass response to the coronavirus was freewheeling. But at some point in ways that werent evident to those around him, Kooper was overwhelmed. A study in the March 2021 issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, of people aged 11 to 21 visiting emergency rooms found significantly higher rates of suicidal ideation during the first half of 2020 (compared to 2019), as well as higher rates of suicide attempts, though the actual number of suicides remained flat. Koopers father and his stepmother Heather, who had been together since Kooper was nine, had considered transferring him to a school in Texas, as other families were doing. That is what teens are driven to do: to grow self-esteem and a strong sense of who they are. With school and so much else closed off to them, and daily life mostly limited to the home, the little bit of self-directedness they had before is gone. Justin, as I would soon learn, is a large and taciturn man, but he was eager to talk, and urged me to come to New Mexico to learn more about what Kooper and his friends had been through. The only thing that I was able to find was in his journal was that he had wrote that he was going mad from staying at home all the time and that he just wanted to be able to go to school and play outside with his friends. After being in Denver City, things seemed emptier than ever at the Hobbs high school complex in normal times, the center of communal life in Hobbs. At about 1 p.m., Kooper had texted Sam on Snapchat: Love you, bro. Love you, too, Sam wrote back. The next morning, Dec. 7, Kooper went to his Monday weightlifting session. When the youth minister at church once apologized for missing one of his high school games, Kooper reassured him that it was okay, that he did not depend on an audience: I play for myself, he said. In late January, Gov. Its that years video that recruiters will look at, and that years grades that admissions officers will scrutinize. I knew he was pretty brave, but didnt know he was that brave, Sam said later. And unlike in many other, more Democratic parts of the country, the citys school administrators had the support of many teachers when it came to reopening: A survey in late summer found more than 70% of teachers in favor of in-person instruction. The city of Hobbs, population just under 40,000, sits on the New Mexico side, as tight to the border as a wide receivers toes on a sideline catch. Christian Center Church4024 W. College Lane, Hobbs NM 88240Tel: 1-575-392-5166, 2023 Chapel of Hope. As many of these experts have noted, the cost of restrictions on youth has gone beyond academics. Kooper and his classmates would take their courses at home using an online program, with barely any contact with teachers or each other. I fear for all the kids, he said. The day after that, Wednesday, a fleet of empty school buses arrived at the high school from other towns, one from as far as Clovis, 130 miles away. This is, after all, the region that produced Friday Night Lights.. The county had suffered 112 deaths attributed to COVID-19, which worked out to a per capita rate slightly lower than that in the three Texas counties abutting Lea. Clockwise from top left: Cutter Cruz, Colton Graham, Easton Kuykendall and Caleb Hedrick. New Mexico has consistently had one of the highest youth suicide rates in the country its roughly twice the national average and preliminary state statistics would later show the 2020 rate as unchanged. Hobbs wasnt even holding synchronous classes online for older high schoolers. joe and the juice tunacado ingredients; pickleball courts brentwood; tornado damage in princeton, ky; marshall county inmate roster; steve dunn katu salary. They had tried to make things as nice as possible in those weeks, with an online birthday party for the two kids, and an Easter egg hunt. But Denver City and nearby small cities in West Texas opened schools. Explore the latest videos from hashtags: #hobbsnm, #porterdavishomes . That night, I went to meet with Koopers father and stepmother at their house, which sits out on the edge of town, near a small cattle farm. One of the few aspects of this terrible pandemic to be grateful for is that it has taken a vastly lesser toll on children and young adults than its major precursor of last century, the flu pandemic of 1918-1920. Coach Stevens got the news from the school principal that afternoon. Some precautions were taken, such as umpires calling balls and strikes from behind the mound instead of behind the catcher at home plate. Please contact. Junior year was everything: He would be vying for the starting QB slot on varsity and taking a fistful of Advanced Placement courses. They allowed only for elementary-school instruction, and required a district to stay below an average of eight new cases per day per 100,000 residents over a two-week period. Kooper procrastinated, as usual, but now also found it harder to focus when deadlines hit. Shivering in the parking lot, Fuller told me about Landon, who had just wanted to be everyones friend. He was the sort, she said, who always went over to any kid sitting by themselves on the playground. In reading that, she had drawn a connection to American children who were being forced into a whole different way of life during the pandemic. Its not necessarily that youre experiencing abuse, though some may be. He joked about Kooper letting one of his sisters sleep in one of his shirts, his willingness to dress up as a baby during the church skit for the little kids, and how Kooper was the only one of the young people he knew who would actually call him on the phone sometimes, just to talk. Any website our stories appear on must include a prominent and effective way to contact you. March 8, 2021: Due to an inconsistency in data provided by the National Governors Association, an earlier version of this article misrepresented three states COVID-19 case thresholds for reopening schools. Kooper was born in Hobbs NM on August 9, 2003 and spent his childhood in Lovington before moving to Hobbs with his family, Father Justin Davis, Mother Heather Davis and his younger siblings, where he was an honors student, athlete and student leader. Since Im a junior, college is starting to cross my mind, and without this essential year of learning, I feel completely unprepared for college. We know that participation in sports and a connection to school can have a profound protective effect., That social connection has been attenuated in the parts of the country that have largely shuttered school buildings and associated activities. His home and away jerseys, his school backpack and a school photograph were also displayed. The boys respective high school and rec-league baseball seasons were canceled last spring, but their club teams were still playing through the summer and fall. In New Mexico, mental health experts say, the factors also include high rates of depression on Native American reservations, and rural isolation in general. Justin and Heather told me how much comfort they were taking in the outpouring over Kooper, especially among his classmates. Of the nearly 500,000 deaths in the U.S. analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of early March, 252 were among those 18 or younger five hundredths of a percent of the total. He was one of the most driven people I have known. He described Koopers protective loyalty, how he once ran in from the outfield of a church softball game to confront someone who was having words with Heather. According to Fox News, the Christmas tree was important for the mother as it has the ornaments hung by her son. Everyone tells us to keep positive, but its been almost a year. Celeste Sloman is a photographer and director based in New York. Good, she said, because Kooper would be out of the question.. As it was sinking in with Kooper and his classmates that school would remain remote for the rest of the fall, they got word in early October of an additional setback on the sports front. So honestly when do we stand up for our kids?? Kooper Davis took his own life on December 07, 2020. There are the pump jacks scattered across the plains, nodding up and down with metronomic regularity. More resources had belatedly started pouring into the state: a $10 million federal grant for school-based mental health services, plus $500,000 in CARES Act funds. Last summer the town was in the news when a despondent 11-year-old who had loved school and sports had killed himself. He attended Mills Elementary school before moving to Roswell NM, where he graduated from Goddard High School in 1991. They eagerly did so, several dozen of them bunched together, beaming for the camera. 2017-2023 Tribute Archive. The overall per-capita case numbers in Lea County were slightly higher than the three counties across the border, while the case numbers in Texas were slightly higher than in New Mexico. As the pandemic carried through the summer, worrisome signals started appearing across the country. The students wore masks and sat spaced apart on the stands, holding signs that said Let Us Play and SOS Save Our Students. They had the tacit support of their coaches and many of their parents, some of whom had helped shoot a testimonial video that was going to be shown on the scoreboard screen. One thing that maybe our decision makers dont remember is that when youre in high school or youre a kid, thinking youre the only one dealing with something. If normally lighthearted Kooper, despite a loving family and natural gifts, had been struggling so much, what about all the others? Menu penelope loyalty quotes. Around 8 a.m. Tuesday, New Mexico State Police personnel investigated a double fatal, single-vehicle crash on New Mexico State Road 31 at about mile post 19, east of Carlsbad, in Eddy County. The CDC has also recorded about 2,000 cases of an inflammatory syndrome that has afflicted some children after they contracted the virus, resulting in about 30 additional deaths. As for teachers, there was no option: Their job was in the classroom. She began by reading some lines Kooper had written in his journal, including his paraphrase of a verse of Scripture, If your enemy is hurting give him food. can stop at any time. ), Statewide in New Mexico, the restrictions resulted in zero high schools or middle schools reopening anywhere in the state. Im glad we care about this now, but our state was high pre-pandemic, Kelly said. I had an open relationship with my son, he said. He was the first to come, and last to leave. The event was in gross violation of the state rules on indoor gatherings, which were supposed to be capped at 40 people, but no sheriffs deputy was about to intervene on this day. The next day, Coach Stevens gathered his players and assistant coaches in the team meeting room to discuss Koopers death. Theres too much hurt, Espinoza said as I headed out of her house after our conversation. The median age for COVID-19 fatalities in the U.S. is about 80. Kooper Davis came across the border once with a friend to see a game in Levelland, northeast of Denver City, and another time with his father, Justin, to see a game in Seminole. You cant republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. Weve got districts 30 miles away doing it safely, associate superintendent Gene Strickland said. The football coach, Ken Stevens, could sense the morale plunging. Funeral Home website by. Thats the frustration, he said. Kooper Davis came across the border once with a friend to see a game in Levelland, northeast of Denver City, and another time with his father, Justin, to see a game in Seminole. So many kids are turning to the wrong things to fill a void. He liked his teachers, and they liked him. Two days later, the town learned of another life lost: an 18-year-old who had graduated from Hobbs High that spring took his life at a local park after receiving a medical discharge from the Navy. how did kooper davis of hobbs die hanging on y ligaments hanging on y ligaments. On Friday nights, high schools still played football, with fans in the stands. Justin, who works for a company that services oil-field equipment and runs a lawn care business on the side, noticed the reaction his tall, athletic son was getting in the Seminole stands. Doctors are concerned about possible increases in childhood obesity no surprise with many kids housebound in stress-filled homes while addiction experts are warning of the long-term effects of endless hours of screen time when both schoolwork and downtime stimulation are delivered digitally. Football at the teenage level differs from baseball in a crucial respect: It is based almost entirely around high schools, without a parallel universe of clubs and tournaments. If you like our stories, mind sharing this with a friend? Schools in New Mexico partially reopened in February, after being mostly closed for nearly a year. The next day, a Monday evening, Kooper and his classmates held a demonstration for reopening school and school sports, one of several across the county that day. The parents ran the political gamut: liberals from Baltimore, conservatives from rural towns in Pennsylvania. We need to be back on the field. He missed football so much that, on some Friday evenings, he headed across the state line to Texas to watch a game. Justin, as I would soon learn, is a large and taciturn man, but he was eager to talk, and urged me to come to New Mexico to learn more about what Kooper and his friends had been through. Thanks for signing up. Whatever it takes, said Rick Martinez, the principal. And one weekend late afternoon in November, when it was below 30 degrees out, two dozen boys went to school to play touch football, the closest they had come to having a game. This includes publishing or syndicating our work on platforms or apps such as Apple News, Google News, etc. Few people were wearing face masks. To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of Kooper Davis please visit our,

Kooper Davis went to meet Jesus on Monday, December 7, 2020. 

Kooper was born in Hobbs NM on August 9, 2003 and spent his childhood in Lovington before moving to Hobbs with his family, Father Justin Davis, Mother Heather Davis and his younger siblings, where he was an honors student, athlete and student leader. 

Kooper was very involved in and loved being part of his church family as well as being a Christian. 

He was an amazing big brother and had very close relationships with his younger siblings.  

He is survived by his father and mother, Justin and Heather Davis, his biological mother Sarah, his sister Kynlee, sister Kharley, brother Kroy, and brother Kohen, brother Tayton and sister Emara,  multiple grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, teachers, administrators, and coaches.   

In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations in memory of Kooper to be made to Christian Center Church. His natural high spirits had carried him through his lifes primary challenge to date, his parents breakup when he was a small child. The district, which offered daily and weekly tallies of cases on its website, determined that the vast share of transmissions seemed to be happening outside school, as research was finding to be the case in other places, too. So that was the only thing that I can imagine what was going through his head at that time. I asked if she thought school should have opened in the fall, and she hesitated. Over the course of the fall semester, about a dozen of the 70 staff members in the Denver City school missed time for quarantine, mostly after testing positive themselves, forcing the district to find substitutes no easy task, but not insurmountable. His parents also believed social isolation played a role in his death: I think the big question we all have is why, and we will never know the reason why, said Katrina. Its baffling to us to figure out why he didnt come to us., Suicide is ultimately an unfathomable act, but Justin said he was sure of one thing. He played basketball, too, but football had his heart. A growing body of evidence suggests that younger children are the least likely to transmit the virus, but that as children grow older, their capacity for transmission approaches that of adults. He spoke at the event, telling people I just believe we should be here at school and we should be here playing football. All he knew was that Kooper had been upset about the closures.  These funds will go to future scholarship funds, football boosters and basketball boosters.

. Like others in Hobbs, he was not unprepared for such calls: There had been at least six suicide attempts by Hobbs students during the pandemic, according to district officials. More than just scholastic considerations were driving this. Your email will not be used for any other purpose. Plus, Kooper wanted to play with his team, his friends. The CDC found that the proportion of visits to the emergency room by adolescents between ages 12 and 17 that were mental-health-related increased 31% during the span of March to October 2020, compared with the same months in 2019. Finally, the nationwide surge in gun violence since the start of the pandemic has included, in many cities, a sharp rise in crimes involving juveniles, including many killed or arrested during what would normally be school time. Her grandfather recently died of COVID-19. Thats what you think when youre 16: Nobody is dealing with what Im dealing with. Not to mention, he said, that the closures have simply given kids too many empty hours. Suicide is ultimately an unfathomable act, but Justin said he was sure of one thing. New Mexicos response last year was the opposite. The boys and their parents wore their masks inside the motels; at games, the parents spread out in the bleachers or on the sidelines. Hobbs Municipal Schools had an enrollment of about 10,000 students last year, but are down around 10%, loosing around 1,200 students this year, according to enrollment numbers compiled by Hobbs Assistant Superintendent for Data and Assessment Rene Cantu. Like mosquitos carrying a tropical disease., In Los Angeles, county supervisor Hilda Solis, a former Obama labor secretary, urged young people to stay home, noting the risk of them infecting older members of their households. Kooper Davis went to meet Jesus on Monday, December 7, 2020. Abe died on Nov. 30, at 49, before she could see him. The buses had condolence messages painted on the windows: We are here for you, read the writing on the bus from Portales. Kooper Davis could only watch from 30 miles away from New Mexico while the Texas teams played and the New Mexico teams did not. Fact-based, independent journalism is needed now more than ever. Sam was lifting weights with another friend in the small workout room that his father had set up. Plenty of parents continue to worry for their childrens health amid the pandemic. He started playing organized football at age 5 and could not get enough of it. No other kid in this day and age called, he said. Its trash, said one, Kevin Melissa. Kooper Davis went to meet Jesus on Monday, December 7, 2020. Like Texas, we have to learn to live with it, he said. Kooper started heading off to quarterback camps and private training in Atlanta, New Orleans and Tucson, among other cities hoping to better his odds of getting to play in college, an. That meant all they could really do was lift weights: Kooper was despondent. Those weekends remain for me some of the only redeeming moments of an awful year. I have no doubt that God is not done using Kooper, he said. Is Biden leaving wiggle room in his decision to run for re-election? Speaking about the same . Seth Titus lost two friends to suicide only months apart. Read the full story. This meant they would mostly just be lifting weights, never mind that this often meant having many players in the weight room at a time (albeit in four-player pods), seemingly a riskier proposition than a regular practice outdoors. Kooper was vying against three other players for the starting quarterback spot. He was a straight-A student and the quarterback for the Hobbs high school football team. Sad, its so sad. She took the coronavirus seriously, she said. Whats going on with those other kids?. I found an empty space to stand in the back. The school did not administer coronavirus tests on its own, but if a student or teacher tested positive locally, the school conducted contact tracing to determine if any other teacher or student had been exposed to them for 15 minutes or more, unmasked, within six feet. A simple Google search will bring up plenty of others. Check out Kooper Davis's high school sports home, including game updates while playing basketball at Hobbs High School. But thats me being selfish. My family was among those facing these decisions. Everything looks the same on either side of the Texas-New Mexico border in the great oil patch of the Permian Basin. Denver City is a humble-looking town, with a Family Dollar and no Walmart, but oil-and-gas revenues had allowed it to build a new high school two years ago. All rights reserved. This toll has led a growing number of epidemiologists, pediatricians and other physicians to argue for reopening schools as broadly as possible, amid growing evidence that schools are not major venues for transmission of the virus. I reached Justin Davis on the phone that Saturday, after learning of Koopers death from a mother in northwestern New Mexico whose daughter had also struggled with the absence of school and sports. He called back five minutes later to say that yes, he had gotten the name right. The team in Seminole, 20 miles south, needed to cancel some games as the result of player quarantines, but Denver City managed to get through the fall without any cancellations, though there were some weeks where the roster got thin. And Fuller told me about the difficult weeks of the initial lockdown in the spring, when both she and her husband were feeling the stress of a loss of income. But the districts push to reopen was rebuffed by the state education department. That was the last he heard from his friend. This was a problem, because he loved both of them. Its crazy to think that just down the road, theyre playing a football season theyre almost done with their football season. There were signs that mental health was on his mind. That earlier pandemics victims tended to be in the prime of life, with mortality peaking around age 28. If I had read that before, I wouldnt have thought that he was planning on taking his own life because I think were all feeling a little crazy right now.. But it was still hard. He was at a loss over what he and Heather might have missed. That may have an effect over time. Initially, practices with up to 9 kids were allowed, which meant they could do some drills, but in October, the state reduced that to four students per coach. No contact sports are going to be permitted this fall, she said. The Texas Education Agency was letting districts make the decision. For more ways to keep up, be sure to check out the rest of our newsletters. United Realty, LLC Happy Hump Day!! The state, led by Democratic Gov. All Rights Reserved. After I chatted with Sam, I walked with his father back to his office. Two Hobbs men were killed Tuesday morning in a rollover crash outside of Carlsbad and a third Hobbsan was injured. Do we fear everyone coming back and possibly getting COVID, or do we fear losing another student more?. Kooper Davis's passing at the age of 17 on Monday, December 07, 2020 has been publicly announced by Chapel Of Hope in Hobbs, NM . . All Rights Reserved. Hobbs High School football player Caleb Hedrick. But the players ended up just wanting to go lift weights together. Justin and Heather Davis with Kooper, then a first-year student. Share a memory of Kooper Davis. Kooper Davis went to meet Jesus on Monday, December 7, 2020. NBC. He is going to continue to use him to impact those around him, and Gods glory will shine through.. His teammates would be allowed to practice only in small pods, which left them mostly doing just weightlifting sessions and agility drills. I cant see them, I cant even hear them, she said. Football went forward, too. Travis was born in 1972 in Hobbs to Patrick Collins and the late Marla Bood Weber. Every weekday morning except Wednesday, he got up at 6:30 a.m., drank a protein shake, then drove to McDonalds for more breakfast, before arriving at school at 7 a.m. for a weightlifting session.

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