Do we fear everyone coming back and possibly getting COVID, or do we fear losing another student more?. In the same week as Lujan Grisham announced her reopening plan, I made another check of the coronavirus toll in Hobbs Lea County. There were counselors on hand, as well as Pastor Kinney, Sams dad. After the death of junior Cooper Davis on Sunday, Aug. 29, the school has taken the opportunity to recognize the issues that come with the increasing availability and abuse of drugs. When he is finally able to return she is on her death-bed, surrounded by her own family. Lunch was still served in the cafeteria, but it never got crowded because many students went into town for lunch, at the McDonalds drive-through or elsewhere. After my meeting with Fuller, I went back to the church. Kooper Davis went to meet Jesus on Monday, December 7, 2020. Fact-based, independent journalism is needed now more than ever.  These funds will go to future scholarship funds, football boosters and basketball boosters.

. 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. He is going to continue to use him to impact those around him, and Gods glory will shine through.. It had been a terrible month, and it had left her uncertain about the best course for the Hobbs schools and sports teams. Celeste Sloman is a photographer and director based in New York. This is, after all, the region that produced Friday Night Lights.. All of our moods changed, she said. Davis planned to put together a highlight real of his games which hed use to attract attention. You cant state or imply that donations to your organization support ProPublicas work. Nationwide, meanwhile, President Bidens push to reopen schools was explicitly leaving out high schools, leaving millions of teenagers with the likelihood of remote learning through the end of the school year. Kooper Davis took his own life on December 07, 2020. Katrina Fuller in the field where her son died. I dont know who it is, but you need to help them. She talked about Justins love for his son: Thats his boy. 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. The Texas Education Agency was letting districts make the decision. Were losing their leadership. These are kids without mental health issues, with good families, kids that are loved, she said. 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. His teammates would be allowed to practice only in small pods, which left them mostly doing just weightlifting sessions and agility drills. Kids have been paying a big price for the lockdowns and for some kids its just too much to handle. As the hot Southwestern summer dragged on, Kooper Davis and his teammates placed faith in that possibility. 2017-2023 Tribute Archive. 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. The closures have also inhibited young peoples striving for independence, youth mental health experts say. He didnt text you or put it on Snap. The Davises were sufficiently attuned to the mental health challenges of the pandemic that they held regular family visits with a therapist, and Kooper had gotten a couple of solo sessions as well before he and the therapist decided that was no longer necessary. She had come to bring her teenage daughter to an outdoor kids workout session that had been arranged hastily a few days earlier, after the news of Koopers death. On the way out of the athletic building, Kooper swung by to see the basketball coach, Eddy Martinez, to tell him he thought he might be able to play with that team, too, if the schedule that the state had floated the previous week actually came to pass: a truncated football season in February, followed by a truncated basketball season. Martinez said hed be glad to have Kooper and that he was welcome to join one of their four-person practice pods that very day. These contact sports are just too high-risk. Even with fall sports canceled, the Hobbs school district, with almost 10,000 students, was still hoping to open the new school year for as much in-person instruction as possible. 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. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. This would have entailed sending Kooper to live with Heathers brother. Heather Davis' son Kooper was 17 years old when he died by suicide last year. This was a problem, because he loved both of them. He had been away from Hobbs at the time, working an oil-field job in Odessa, Texas, and a co-worker he had shared a truck with later tested positive. And now, after the death of a boy that many of them saw as linked to those restrictions, they were effectively, saying, screw it. She had swung the other way on reopening. Legacy invites you to offer condolences and . My biggest fear is, you pull the rug on these kids, he said. The hope was that all this would be temporary. how did kooper davis of hobbs die hanging on y ligaments hanging on y ligaments. How much distress was invisible to parents? Even if New Mexicos overall numbers were holding steady, to those in Hobbs, three youth suicides plus a half-dozen other attempts by students in a matter of months in a population of 39,000 felt like its own epidemic. 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. According to Fox News, the Christmas tree was important for the mother as it has the ornaments hung by her son. But the primary concern from a public health standpoint has been the role that children and young adults might play in transmitting the disease to others. Football Recruiting / New Mexico / Hobbs, NM / Hobbs High School / Kooper Davis. As he left, he told Sam, in typically unabashed fashion, Love you. Love you, too, Sam responded. Not only would New Mexico remain one of a handful of states to bar high school sports, but practices would now be limited to just four players per coach. He wouldve had an adult standing next to him, a coach saying, Kooper, quit being a dummy.. The Texas Classroom Teachers Association had nowhere near the sway of unions in other states. High school football practice has resumed, with some restrictions, in Hobbs. Its okay to put our stories on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories. To send flowers Since Im a junior, college is starting to cross my mind, and without this essential year of learning, I feel completely unprepared for college. But the start of the school year arrived, and there was no school. Two Hobbs men were killed Tuesday morning in a rollover crash outside of Carlsbad and a third Hobbsan was injured. Koopers grandmother, Cindi Federico, with Koopers 6-month-old brother, Kroy, and his cousin, Izaiah Chamberlain, 9. He was thinking about Stanford because it was a top academic school with a good football team. In the pandemic year of 2020, though, the two sides of the state line might as well have been in different hemispheres. I asked if she thought school should have opened in the fall, and she hesitated. to the family, please visit our floral store. 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. 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. We just have to weigh the good and the bad. They would come out with amazing answers. Kooper and Sam Kinney ribbed her about her tendency to lose her phone and took daily attendance for her. Kooper Davis went to meet Jesus on Monday, December 7, 2020. Kinney said he and the Hobbs school superintendent had been talking a few days earlier about the need to get kids back in school. For my older son, the baseball meant frequent traveling to tournaments out of state, in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Recently, Fuller told me, she had received an envelope in the mail from the New Mexico education department. 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. 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. But they said they were thinking of all the other kids in another way, too. October 20, 2021. There were no friends to cajole, no teachers to charm. Not only that, were losing years of their educational development., Kinney said his brother-in-law, also a pastor, had become seriously ill with coronavirus, and he did not doubt its danger. 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 .Legacy invites you to offer condolences and share memories of Kooper in My family was among those facing these decisions. 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. These funds will go to future scholarship funds, football boosters and basketball boosters. This includes publishing or syndicating our work on platforms or apps such as Apple News, Google News, etc. As for teachers, there was no option: Their job was in the classroom. 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. Heather Davis' son, Kooper, died in December of last year, Southwest News Service (SWNS) reports. Junior year was everything: He would be vying for the starting QB slot on varsity and taking a fistful of Advanced Placement courses. Instead, he set his sights on Stanford, which excelled in sports and academics, and which he had visited for another football camp. We do not generally permit translation of our stories into another language. For a while, Kooper went to do some of his schoolwork at the Starbucks near the local Walmart, just to get out of the house, but then it closed down again when state restrictions tightened further. Anyone who fit that definition had to quarantine at home, initially for two weeks, eventually only for 10 days, in line with CDC guidelines. Menu penelope loyalty quotes. How come 10, 15 miles away, these kids can compete, can live a somewhat normal life?. She was heartened by the launch of the exercise class but knew the town needed to come up with more, just to let them know that we love them and theyre so wanted and theyre not alone. She started to cry. I seen a lot of disappointment, he said. 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. He was a kid who had everything, and this is where were at, said Justin. He played basketball, too, but football had his heart. Kooper was despondent. In many parts of the country, particularly cities and towns dominated by Democrats, concerns about virus spread by children has resulted in all sorts of measures: closures of playgrounds, requirements that kids older than 2 wear masks outdoors, rigid restrictions on campus life at colleges that reopened. At about 1 p.m., Kooper had texted Sam on Snapchat: Love you, bro. Love you, too, Sam wrote back. 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. 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. When Kooper was the only boy at Hobbs to make the Junior National Honors Society alongside 20 girls, Espinoza asked him if it felt weird. New Mexicos response last year was the opposite. 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. There would be no actual games. 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. In the large band hall, the band director showed me the dots he had taped on the floor to keep the 70-odd musicians spaced 7.5 feet apart even as they marched, and the cloth covers that one students grandmother had made, decorated with the schools mustang logo, to go over the tubas, to keep them from emitting moisture.