An Evergreen High School senior has written and released a viral, moving song about the school shooting that rocked his Colorado community last week.
Student Judah Cox shared the song — which has since racked up over 2.6 million views — online after Desmond Holly, 16, opened fire at his school on Wednesday.
Holly injured two students before turning the gun on himself and later dying at the hospital.
“This is how I process a lot of things. I’ll just play music. So this was just my backbone,” Judah told CBS News.
The student was at off-campus music lessons near the school building on Wednesday when his mother, Vivian Cox, hurriedly called him to tell him to stay put.
“It hit me that Judah wasn’t there yet,” Vivian Cox told the outlet.
But Judah’s little brother, a freshman at Evergreen, was already at school when Holly unleashed the hail of bullets.
“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!’” the mother said.
“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,” she said.
In the aftermath, her older son turned to penning lyrics and playing the piano to cope with the fallout of the shooting that wounded classmates and disturbed his family.
“When it happens in your hometown on the streets I grew up on, it hits too close. Cause I don’t believe it’s about inclusion. Lord, I pray it’s about reunion with you someday,” the student heartbreakingly sang in the now viral song.
The masterful high school senior plans to continue writing music and performing the song at any fundraiser events for the school.
“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,” Judah told the outlet.
“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,” he added.
Judah expressed his gratitude to all the viewers who are listening to and sharing the untitled song.
“I don’t understand why all this has to happen all the time. Like, this isn’t how high school is supposed to be,” the student said.
“Now that I know that that song has been seen by that many people, it really brings me hope.”
Holly rode the bus to school — which is about 30 miles west of Denver — and used a revolver to rattle off “a lot” of gunshots at around lunchtime, said Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Jacki Kelley.
“He was radicalized by some extremist network,” Kelly said.
Holly, 16, had been active on an online forum where users watch videos of killings and violence, mixed in with content on white supremacy and antisemitism, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism said in a report.
He fired from the outside of the school, striking one student inside and the other victim outside, police said.
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