We just have to weigh the good and the bad. A group of students from Hobbs, including Kooper, held a rally at the football stadium to call for the reopening of school. But Denver City and nearby small cities in West Texas opened schools. how did kooper davis of hobbs die hanging on y ligaments hanging on y ligaments. He was the first to come, and last to leave. Thats the frustration, he said. Doctors are still uncertain whether children who survived that syndrome will experience long-term heart issues or other health problems. If you like our stories, mind sharing this with a friend? From Hobbs to the Texas towns of Seminole and Denver City is a half-hour drive next door, by the standards of the vast Southwestern plains. Justin and Heather told me how much comfort they were taking in the outpouring over Kooper, especially among his classmates. All of the teachers returned. All he knew was that Kooper had been upset about the closures. Definitive explanations were, of course, impossible to come by. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Any website our stories appear on must include a prominent and effective way to contact you. The adults encouraged the players to speak about what they were feeling, not to hold things in. Its trash, said one, Kevin Melissa. You can send your sympathy in the guestbook provided and share it with the family. 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. His grades started slipping from his usual all-As. 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. 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. Few people were wearing face masks. Abe died on Nov. 30, at 49, before she could see him. The parents ran the political gamut: liberals from Baltimore, conservatives from rural towns in Pennsylvania. It was unnerving to watch: lots of people, few masks, no windows. But the video wouldnt load right, so several students went onto the field to give impromptu speeches before the 175 or so people who were gathered there. This is, after all, the region that produced Friday Night Lights.. If high school teams arent playing football, there is no football being played. In "New Amsterdam" Season 3, Dr. Vijay Kapoor (Anupam Kher) contracted COVID-19, with much of the early part of the season revolving around his illness and the attempts by the hospital staff . Football Recruiting / New Mexico / Hobbs, NM / Hobbs High School / Kooper Davis. His parents encouraged him to aim for the Ivy League, but he knew its football was middling. Read the full story. 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. 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. If hes thirsty, give him water, and his interpretation of it: No matter who it is, no matter who the person is, if theyre in need, help them. There are the frequent memorials of another sort, to the victims of vehicle accidents. He liked his teachers, and they liked him. When do we all protest and say this is enough, do we wait until our kids lose life completely? she wrote. 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. Davis, who lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, says she lost her son to suicide just weeks after. Celebrating the life of Kooper Davis Be the first to share your favorite memory, photo or story of Kooper. Artesia loves you, said the bus from Artesia. Some precautions were taken, such as umpires calling balls and strikes from behind the mound instead of behind the catcher at home plate. I get the fear level, but we see models that show it can be done. Some afternoons, hed head over to the church his family belongs to, Christian Center Church, which is led by Sams father, Jotty Kinney, who set up a small weight room for the boys to use. Kooper said he didnt have his basketball shoes, but he would come the next day. And it was so hard for someone of Landons age to grasp time; the six weeks of closure seemed like forever. Kooper often said that suddenly the two biggest loves of his life . Man, this sucks, he told his teammates. 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. Its that years video that recruiters will look at, and that years grades that admissions officers will scrutinize. The next day, Coach Stevens gathered his players and assistant coaches in the team meeting room to discuss Koopers death. All weve been doing is trying to sell hope and belief to these kids that its going to happen, but at some point, theyre going to quit believing in you.. KOOPER DAVIS OBITUARY. Speaking about the same . The younger one would ask why he couldnt get McDonalds, which she preferred, on the way back, and hed explain that traffic made it easier for him to do them in this order. Its hard to be positive.. The median age for COVID-19 fatalities in the U.S. is about 80. 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. 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. He attended Mills Elementary school before moving to Roswell NM, where he graduated from Goddard High School in 1991. The hope was that all this would be temporary. He isn't the only one that was crushed by sacrifices he should never have been forced to make. How come 10, 15 miles away, these kids can compete, can live a somewhat normal life?. My biggest fear is, you pull the rug on these kids, he said. Posted on . 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. 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. As for teachers, there was no option: Their job was in the classroom. The next morning, I met Katrina Fuller, the mother of 11-year-old Landon, in the windswept parking lot of a strip mall. New Mexico as a whole had lost 3,145 people, two-hundredths of a percentage point higher than Texas in per capita terms. 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. They held theirs at the high school football stadium, a hulking edifice that can seat 15,000. Clockwise from top left: Cutter Cruz, Colton Graham, Easton Kuykendall and Caleb Hedrick. He didnt text you or put it on Snap. To send flowers 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, Statewide in New Mexico, the restrictions resulted in zero high schools or middle schools reopening anywhere in the state. No products in the cart. Your email will not be used for any other purpose. James Davis's passing at the age of 79 . On Oct. 16, Kooper shared a grim claim from a state representative on his Facebook account, which he seldom used: The New Mexico Athletic Association reports there have been 8 student-athlete suicides since March 20., Kooper looked so alone and hunched over as he worked that Heather one day posted a picture of him online to share his struggle with others. His arm strength had improved in the past year, so much so that his best friend Sam Kinney, a wide receiver, jokingly complained about the passes starting to hurt. He would be in school if he wasnt dead, she said. 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 The theory is theyre reacting to modern society, she said of the Aboriginal children. This has posed a conundrum from early in the pandemic: How much should children be prevented from doing outside the home, to keep them from contributing to community transmission of a highly contagious virus? And Kooper was a great student of the quarterback position; he had the intangibles, his coaches said. Last summer the town was in the news when a despondent 11-year-old who had loved school and sports had killed himself. 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. Hobbs High School football player Caleb Hedrick. Kooper was very involved in and loved being part of his church family as well as being a Christian. The building has good ventilation, and enough space that it wasnt hard to spread desks to allow for 4 to 6 feet between them, even in a class of 20 or more. He was at a loss over what he and Heather might have missed. The football coach, Ken Stevens, could sense the morale plunging. I have no doubt that God is not done using Kooper, he said. 866-495-5172. Kooper Davis hated online school and he really hated that there was no football his junior year. Its honestly ridiculous. They were among the strictest in the country. I had an open relationship with my son, he said. 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. The best explanation for this is that the only thing Cooper has left in life is Brand. 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. Instead, he set his sights on Stanford, which excelled in sports and academics, and which he had visited for another football camp. They do not have the same ability to vote or speak out.. 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. He liked his teachers, and they liked him. A four-person band with two backup singers played Another in the Fire, a stirring song by the Australian worship band Hillsong United: There was another in the fire/ Standing next to me/ There was another in the waters/ Holding back the seas, Stevens was one of several coaches and trainers who spoke via a recorded feed played on the big screen over the stage. Before the event broke up, someone encouraged all of Koopers classmates to get together on stage for a group photo. (By contrast, Kentuckys daily threshold was 25 cases per 100,000 people and Oklahomas was 50 cases. 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. The coronavirus pandemic has been not only a health catastrophe, but an epic failure of national government. Weve got districts 30 miles away doing it safely, associate superintendent Gene Strickland said. Kooper Davis had always thrived in school. 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. The mother ensured the tree stayed the same way the way her son had decorated it and therefore, she wrapped it up with cellophane. Whats happening is that were taking away high points in peoples lives that give them reward and meaning. 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., Mental health experts struggle to identify a precedent for the challenge this pandemic is producing for many Americans. No doubt, if my son had been in school on Monday this wouldnt have happened, he said. These contact sports are just too high-risk. How is this life that they are living.. Or to put it more broadly: How much of normal youth should they be asked to sacrifice? But he also knew how adolescents had the natural tendency to magnify troubles. You are free to republish it so long as you do the following: Heather Davis comforts Madasyn Culver after a youth church service in Hobbs, New Mexico in late February. You cant go to sporting events, you cant see your friends, you cant go to parties. Discover short videos related to kooper davis hobbs nm on TikTok. Please contact. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The Texas Education Agency was letting districts make the decision. 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. Kooper Davis Student at Carson-Newman College Selmer, Tennessee, United States. 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. For high school junior Kooper Davis, whose family lives 10 minutes west of the border, this meant no school and no football. Still, the news of an 11-year-old taking his life after riding his bike to a field near his house had the power to shock in Hobbs. Is Biden leaving wiggle room in his decision to run for re-election? In the same week as Lujan Grisham announced her reopening plan, I made another check of the coronavirus toll in Hobbs Lea County. So many kids are turning to the wrong things to fill a void. The best thing we can do is to get them back to classrooms. It had been a terrible month, and it had left her uncertain about the best course for the Hobbs schools and sports teams. Kooper Davis took his own life on December 07, 2020. She opened it and found a letter demanding to know why Landon had been truant from his online classes during the fall semester. Recently, Fuller told me, she had received an envelope in the mail from the New Mexico education department. You know? Now Koopers death was making her reconsider again. Frogxit: Harry and Meghan get what they asked for, Knock it down: Albuquerque tries novel approach to crime fighting, California high-speed rail costs going up and projected ridership going down, When you go after the Queen Consort, you'd best not miss, California's drought situation has improved dramatically, Not so fast: CA NOT going to shutter nasty old Diablo Canyon nuke plant, Don't expect Biden to drop by East Palestine. Hawaii, one of the states least affected by the pandemic, put its threshold at 360 cases over a 14-day period. 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. Enter Watch popular content from the following creators: cl(@chelsleigh2020), mckayla(@mckayla..pierce), angelroseeee12(@roseeeeeeee_0), Lily DeSciscio(@lilymdesciscio), taylorholdridge99(@egdirdlohrolyat22) . Lost hope. Some players stopped showing up. NBC. As many of these experts have noted, the cost of restrictions on youth has gone beyond academics. I fear for all the kids, he said. I dont care how good a kid you are, if you have so much time on your hands, youre going to find mischief., He told me how dearly he hoped the state stuck to its plan for a football season, truncated though it was. So that was the only thing that I can imagine what was going through his head at that time. As time has gone on, evidence has grown on one side of the equation: the harm being done to children by restricting their circulation. There is the well-documented fall-off in student academic performance at schools that have shifted to virtual learning, which, copious evidence now shows, is exacerbating racial and class divides in achievement. I arrived in Hobbs two days later, just in time for the memorial inside Christian Center Church. My family was among those facing these decisions. Help them. how did kooper davis of hobbs die david buckner obituary chattanooga tn david buckner obituary chattanooga tn. On some Tuesdays and Thursdays, hed head to school for an afternoon session with the other quarterbacks, learning how to read defensive coverage. For student-athletes aspiring to play in college, junior year is key. 877-845-6272. He shot to fame in the latter half of the 20th century and was an essential component of any and all of the jazz movements that took place at the time. your email below for our complimentary daily grief messages. Those weekends remain for me some of the only redeeming moments of an awful year. He was at a loss over what he and Heather might have missed. 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. Everyone tells us to keep positive, but its been almost a year. No, I like it!. He could think of nothing, other than the fact that he had noticed that one of Koopers grades had slipped below his norm. 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. 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. But it was still hard. Check out Kooper Davis's high school sports home, including game updates while playing basketball at Hobbs High School. The weekends is where theyre getting it, said principal Rick Martinez. Kinney said he and the Hobbs school superintendent had been talking a few days earlier about the need to get kids back in 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. He was hoping his grades and his performance on the field would be enough to get him into a good college.  These funds will go to future scholarship funds, football boosters and basketball boosters.

. 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. He called back five minutes later to say that yes, he had gotten the name right. Already a member? Schools in New Mexico partially reopened in February, after being mostly closed for nearly a year. In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations in memory of Kooper to be made to Christian Center Church. But the districts push to reopen was rebuffed by the state education department. 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. Justin and Heather Davis with Kooper, then a first-year student. If we do well, if we work hard, it is possible we could just be delaying them and they could be played later in the year and later into the season. Please pm me if you or anyone you know could use a helping hand.. You cant sell our material separately or syndicate it. 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. Students were attending five days a week, without the hassle of hybrid schedules used in much of the country. He would, in general, be getting to enjoy the experience of being Kooper Davis, a well-liked kid in a small city where the admiration flowed even from the youngsters he helped out at church, one of whom, a 9-year-old boy, was overheard gleefully reporting to his father that Kooper Davis knew his name. Its crazy to think that just down the road, theyre playing a football season theyre almost done with their football season. 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. But they said they were thinking of all the other kids in another way, too. The smiles were jarring in the context of a memorial service until one remembered the broader context: It was the first time they had all gotten to be together since March. The state, led by Democratic Gov. Malena Moreno and her boyfriend, Pedro Gavin Garcia, were friends of Koopers from Lovington, New Mexico, where Kooper lived until he was 12. 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. 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 spoke at the event, telling people I just believe we should be here at school and we should be here playing football. New Mexicos response last year was the opposite. 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.