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. Kids have been paying a big price for the lockdowns and for some kids its just too much to handle. Its about lockdowns and the teens who are struggling and sometimes unable to deal with it. At about 1 p.m., Kooper had texted Sam on Snapchat: Love you, bro. Love you, too, Sam wrote back. He charmed classmates and teachers alike with his playful ebullience. Theres a difference between a stressor that makes your life unpleasant and intolerable and a stressor that takes away good things, he said. He was at a loss over what he and Heather might have missed. When youd see him smile, you didn't know what was going on under that mop of hair he had, he said. Kooper was very involved in and loved being part of his church family as well as being a Christian. Allow us that opportunity.. Its crazy to think that just down the road, theyre playing a football season theyre almost done with their football season. No other kid in this day and age called, he said. You cant sell our material separately or syndicate it. Students wore masks in the hallways and administrators did contact tracing for positive cases of coronavirus, but everything else went pretty much as usual, including sports. Clockwise from top left: Cutter Cruz, Colton Graham, Easton Kuykendall and Caleb Hedrick. 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 . A lot are stuck in environments they didnt choose. KOOPER DAVIS OBITUARY. Celebrating the life of Kooper Davis Be the first to share your favorite memory, photo or story of Kooper. Football Recruiting / New Mexico / Hobbs, NM / Hobbs High School / Kooper Davis. The closures have also inhibited young peoples striving for independence, youth mental health experts say. 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. She took the coronavirus seriously, she said. "No doubt, if my son had been in school on Monday this wouldn't have happened," said his father, Justin Davis. In Prince Georges County, Maryland, a Washington, D.C., suburb where school buildings have remained closed, seven teenagers were charged with murder in just the first five weeks of this year. This includes publishing or syndicating our work on platforms or apps such as Apple News, Google News, etc. A simple Google search will bring up plenty of others. 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. well-documented fall-off in student academic performance, deaths by suicide in the 10-to-24 age group, If youre republishing online, you must link to the URL of this story on propublica.org, include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up language and link, and use our. 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. how did kooper davis of hobbs die. Kooper Davis could only watch from 30 miles away from New Mexico while the Texas teams played and the New Mexico teams did not. 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. This didnt keep many large urban districts in the state from starting the school year with remote learning. For Hobbs and the rest of Lea County, population 70,000, that meant no more than five new cases per day in the whole county. And it was so hard for someone of Landons age to grasp time; the six weeks of closure seemed like forever. After my meeting with Fuller, I went back to the church. He was a straight-A student and the quarterback for the Hobbs high school football team. This was a problem, because he loved both of them. Allow us that opportunity., Kooper Davis had always thrived in school. Koopers grandmother, Cindi Federico, with Koopers 6-month-old brother, Kroy, and his cousin, Izaiah Chamberlain, 9. Its crazy to think that just down the road, theyre playing a football season theyre almost done with their football season. On some Tuesdays and Thursdays, hed head to school for an afternoon session with the other quarterbacks, learning how to read defensive coverage. 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. Its that years video that recruiters will look at, and that years grades that admissions officers will scrutinize. Like Texas, we have to learn to live with it, he said. Kooper Davis took his own life on December 07, 2020. He grinned. how did kooper davis of hobbs die steve dunn katu salary steve dunn katu salary. After repeatedly broken promises for his sports teams and school life to return in any shape whatsoever, high-school junior and promising athlete Kooper Davis of Hobbs also died by suicide. Students wore masks in the hallways and administrators did contact tracing for positive cases of coronavirus, but everything else went pretty much as usual, including sports. Thats the frustration, he said. . He spoke at the event, telling people I just believe we should be here at school and we should be here playing football. The story takes place in Hobbs, New Mexico, a small city that sits right up against the border with Texas. I want him to tickle the babies while I go eat, she said. 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. Other tolls would be harder to assess, in a year of so much damage done, in so many ways. Those weekends remain for me some of the only redeeming moments of an awful year. I found an empty space to stand in the back. Read the full story. 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. 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. Obituary. We do not generally permit translation of our stories into another language. This memorial page is dedicated for family, friends and future generations to celebrate the life of their loved one. 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. That meant all they could really do was lift weights: Kooper was despondent. My last visit in Hobbs was to the home of Jennifer Espinoza, Koopers favorite teacher. I chatted with some of Koopers teammates, asking them how they were handling remote learning. Ive blamed myself., She had done a lot of reading on youth suicide since Landons death, and had learned that rates were especially high in indigenous communities, like the Aboriginal community of Australia. Justin and Heather Davis with Kooper, then a first-year student. They were required to wear masks in the hallways or while moving around a classroom, but many teachers allowed them to take their masks off at their desks, judging the spacing sufficient, though the teachers kept their own masks on. Participation in sports and a connection to school can have a profound protective effect, according to David Brent, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh. At the microphone, Kooper introduced himself, then said, I play football and basketball and those sports make up a big part of my life, and when Im not here every day doing something with those sports, honestly, I feel really lost in life. 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. Koopers been Justins rock. She recounted all their morning chats together, after his workout sessions. My family was among those facing these decisions. For Kooper, autumn brought no relief. He wouldve had an adult standing next to him, a coach saying, Kooper, quit being a dummy.. In the pandemic year of 2020, though, the two sides of the state line might as well have been in different hemispheres. Kooper Davis hated online school and he really hated that there was no football his junior year. Davis, who lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, says she lost her son to suicide just weeks after. If normally lighthearted Kooper, despite a loving family and natural gifts, had been struggling so much, what about all the others? Its hard to imagine the pain this family is dealing with and the questions about what they might have done differently that will probably be with them for the rest of their lives. 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. As many of these experts have noted, the cost of restrictions on youth has gone beyond academics. Recently, Fuller told me, she had received an envelope in the mail from the New Mexico education department. Fingers crossed, and I believe in you that we can get this done.. 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. We should be more careful with kids, wrote Andy Slavitt, a Medicare and Medicaid administrator under President Barack Obama who was named senior advisor for President Joe Bidens coronavirus task force, in a Jan. 3 tweet. 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. Her grandfather recently died of COVID-19. 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. Lea County, of which it is part, would vote 79% for Trump in 2020. If we could have them all week, this is the best place for them to be.. 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 played basketball, too, but football had his heart. Seth Titus lost two friends to suicide only months apart. Please contact. 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. And unfortunately the Davis family is not alone even in Hobbs, New Mexico. Making it especially tough, he said, was the nearby contrast. 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. 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. We have official accounts for ProPublica on. There are the frequent memorials of another sort, to the victims of vehicle accidents. 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. Our sons, now 16 and 13, have had fully remote learning in their Baltimore public schools for nearly a year now. Everything looks the same on either side of the Texas-New Mexico border in the great oil patch of the Permian Basin. James parents said there were no obvious signs that their son was struggling. And then Kooper had died, a week later. 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. The hope was that all this would be temporary. On Friday nights, high schools still played football, with fans in the stands. But the start of the school year arrived, and there was no school. 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. Already a member? Kooper and his classmates would take their courses at home using an online program, with barely any contact with teachers or each other. His home and away jerseys, his school backpack and a school photograph were also displayed. 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. Fact-based, independent journalism is needed now more than ever. But the districts push to reopen was rebuffed by the state education department. On Friday nights, high schools still played football, with fans in the stands. They do not have the same ability to vote or speak out.. 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. This confounded Hobbs school officials, especially because they could see open schools across the border in Texas. Katrina, a prenatal educator, had been trying for months to draw attention to the mental health needs of Hobbs young people. In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations in memory of Kooper to be made to Christian Center Church. James Davis's passing at the age of 79 . They were among the strictest in the country. I had an open relationship with my son, he said. More than just scholastic considerations were driving this. The novel coronavirus, by contrast, has hit the elderly the hardest. If high school teams arent playing football, there is no football being played. Artesia loves you, said the bus from Artesia. 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. Most notably, it gave local school districts leeway in deciding whether to open for in-person instruction in August, and in conservative West Texas, many districts seized the opportunity to do so, for all grades, all the way up through high school. 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. For them, the primary release from the hours staring at the laptop screen would be sports, and for us, the answer was clear: My wife and I would let them play. Last summer the town was in the news when a despondent 11-year-old who had loved school and sports had killed himself. The parking lot was jammed with oversized pickups, and the sanctuary was standing room only. Lujan Grisham announced in July that football and soccer would be prohibited for the fall season. 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. Messages run for up to one year and you 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. 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. No doubt, if my son had been in school on Monday this wouldnt have happened, he said. So that was the only thing that I can imagine what was going through his head at that time., Hobbs is heavily conservative. joe and the juice tunacado ingredients; pickleball courts brentwood; tornado damage in princeton, ky; marshall county inmate roster; steve dunn katu salary. The theory is theyre reacting to modern society, she said of the Aboriginal children. He was the first to come, and last to leave. Its taken a lot of time and effort, but our kids are getting instruction face to face.. Its been stressful at times, said the district superintendent, Patrick Torres. NBC. There always seems like theres something new to cry about.. Stringent guidelines for reopening schools in New Mexico meant students in Hobbs have experienced the pandemic differently than students across the border in Texas. I cant see them, I cant even hear them, she said. Kooper had always gotten straight As, despite a tendency to leave big assignments to the last minute. Koopers father, Justin, during an altar call at church in February. (By contrast, Kentuckys daily threshold was 25 cases per 100,000 people and Oklahomas was 50 cases. The coronavirus pandemic has been not only a health catastrophe, but an epic failure of national government. You cant state or imply that donations to your organization support ProPublicas work. Few people were wearing face masks. He was a straight-A student and the quarterback for the Hobbs high school football team. Michelle Lujan Grisham, took one of the most aggressive lockdown stances in the country, and issued stringent guidelines for school reopening, so stringent that Hobbs was allowed to bring back only a sliver of its students for in-person instruction. As the pandemic carried through the summer, worrisome signals started appearing across the country. He was hoping his grades and his performance on the field would be enough to get him into a good college. Despite the cold, two dozen kids, most in their early teens, had come out to the parking lot and were now doing various kickboxing exercises spaced apart and with masks on under the guidance of some martial arts instructors. Numerous factors had affected these outcomes, needless to say. 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. Menu penelope loyalty quotes. This confounded Hobbs school officials, especially because they could see open schools across the border in Texas. 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.. Ive heard it all, Fuller said. ProPublica published a story today that is legitimately heartbreaking. He called you., When the service ended, people stayed on for a while to talk and hug each other. The state, led by Democratic Gov. Kooper Davis had always thrived in school. But Kooper hated virtual school. . Plenty of parents continue to worry for their childrens health amid the pandemic. The adults encouraged the players to speak about what they were feeling, not to hold things in. October 20, 2021. So honestly when do we stand up for our kids?? On Sunday, Dec. 6, as semester finals were getting underway for school, Kooper was at church as usual, dressed as a baby for a monthly skit he and Sam did for the little kids. No, they said. According to Fox News, the Christmas tree was important for the mother as it has the ornaments hung by her son. A group of students from Hobbs, including Kooper, held a rally at the football stadium to call for the reopening of school. The best explanation for this is that the only thing Cooper has left in life is Brand. 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. (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. Legacy invites you to offer condolences and . Kooper was very involved in and loved being part of his church family as well as being a Christian. This all started before the resumption of Major League Baseball and other professional sports, and it sometimes seemed as if our tournaments were the only serious competitive sports happening in the country, a sort of speakeasy baseball. Share a memory of Kooper Davis. The next day, Coach Stevens gathered his players and assistant coaches in the team meeting room to discuss Koopers death. Im glad we care about this now, but our state was high pre-pandemic, Kelly said. How much distress was invisible to parents? His grades started slipping from his usual all-As. Kooper was despondent. Its hard to be positive.. 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.