Evergreen High School student searches for hope after shooting in song
By Sarah Horbacewicz
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EVERGREEN, Colorado (KCNC) — Just outside Evergreen, Colorado, high school senior Judah Cox finds his voice through music.
“This is how I process a lot of things. I’ll just play music. So this was just my backbone,” Judah Cox said, “Every day I at least, I kind of sit down and write a song or two.”
Before heading to Evergreen High School each day, he spends his mornings in a live music class down the road, where he was on Wednesday when he got a call from his mom.
Mom Vivian Cox said, “It hit me that Judah wasn’t there yet, and so I’m calling him and telling him to stay where he was, but I just kept screaming to my younger son, ‘Don’t hang up. Don’t you. Hang up on me!'”
At 12:24 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 10, there was a shooting at Evergreen High School. The student shooter killed himself and shot and injured two classmates. Both Judah and his brother got home safely – but shaken.
“I almost lost my children. And that’s not what any parent ever wants to think about. Is their child running for his life? That’s just not. That’s your worst nightmare come true,” Vivian Cox said.
Judah Cox added, “You hear about it all the time on the news, and it’s just horrible. But then you’re like, well, it’s not going to be my school, and then it is, and you can’t do anything about it.”
So he did the only thing he knew to share his feelings, the only way he knew how, back at his keyboard.
“But as soon as I started writing the lyrics, that’s when I really knew that this song was different. And I was just bawling at the piano as I wrote this,” Judah Cox.
The song begins saying, “When it happens in your hometown on the streets of groom up on it’s too close, when I get the call from my mama telling me my brother is still in that place.”
Judah decided to share the song on social media, and it struck a chord, one line in the song, “I don’t believe it’s about inclusion. Lord, I pray it’s about reunion with you someday.”
In just days, the song has now been heard around the world and played more than two million times.
Vivian Cox explains, “To see the impact on 2.5 million people to have that many people say, hey, me too. Like this, this in so many people that have even said, like, I don’t even believe in God, but this song made me cry.”
“It made a lot of my friends cry, which is hard to hear, but like, also, I think we all needed that,” Judah Cox said.
And as schools stay closed in Evergreen, Judah Cox plans to keep writing and help a healing community find its voice.
“I don’t understand why all this has to happen all the time. Like, this isn’t how high school is supposed to be,” Judah Cox said, “Now that I know that that song has been seen by that many people, it really brings me hope.”
“He’s taken some of the… I hope are the darkest moments of his life… and turned them all around and just reminded us that there is good and there is hope,” Vivian Cox said.
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