Cohen Craddock, 14, died on Saturday after he sustained injuries during a Friday football practice in Madison, West Virginia. An outpouring of support has been seen as news spread through the area.

A West Virginia community is mourning the loss of a middle school athlete who died Saturday, one day after he was injured in football practice.

Cohen Craddock, an eighth-grade student at Madison Middle School in Madison, West Virginia, died on Saturday after sustaining injuries during a Friday football practice. Madison is located about 30 miles outside of Charleston, the state capital.

Joseph Smith, executive director of the Boone County Ambulance Authority, told local news station WSAZ that medics responded Friday to Madison Middle School to treat a football player who sustained a head injury.

Cohen was then taken to a hospital for further treatment; a day later, on Saturday, he succumbed to his injuries. The Boone County Ambulance Authority, who responded to his injuries posted a memorial for Cohen on their Facebook page.

“Today we’re all Redhawks and our hearts are heavy with the unimaginable loss of a bright young athlete in our community,” the post said.

The Boone County Schools Superintendent Matthew Riggs released a statement of behalf of the schools. 

“The entire Boone County Schools’ community is beginning to mourn the loss of Cohen Craddock, an 8th-grade student at Madison Middle School. As a Redhawk, Cohen was loved by his classmates, his teachers, his administrators, and the entire Madison Middle School staff,” the statement said.

An outpouring of support came following the news from nearby communities with Roane County High School posting a memorial on their Facebook page.

Schools around the US mourn fallen athletes

Cohen’s death in West Virginia is the most recent in a handful of cases that have generated headlines around the country as football season is getting underway, including some with unique circumstances.

In Alabama, Caden Tellier, the quarterback for Morgan Academy in Selma suffered a brain injury during the team’s home opener on Friday and died the following day. Tellier’s death followed that of New Brockton 14-year-old Semaj Wilkins, who suffered a medical emergency during an afternoon football practice on Aug. 13 and passed away.

In Kansas, 15-year-old Ovet Gomez-Regalado died two days after suffering a medical emergency in an Aug. 14 practice at his high school outside of Kansas City.

And in Hopewell, Virginia, Javion Taylor, 15, died after doing about 40 minutes of light drills on Aug. 5.

Fernando Cervantes Jr. is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach him at fernando.cervantes@gannett.com and follow him on X @fern_cerv_.

Drug addiction remains a widespread, deadly problem in West Virginia, state lawmakers heard in a presentation filled with alarming, spine-chilling figures.

“I won’t bury the lead. The bottom line is that we have not made enough progress on this crisis. We’re nowhere near where we need to be, and our data related to other states and even our own expectations has fallen far short,” Jeremiah Samples, senior policy adviser for the West Virginia Legislature told members of the Joint Standing Committee on Health. 

His Monday afternoon presentation, while dark, was not without hope. Samples advised a reassessment of substance abuse disorder strategies and expenditures through an emphasis on what is happening to real people in communities.

He also expressed optimism about new West Virginia First Foundation, the nonprofit organization with access to millions of dollars in drug settlement money that can be aimed at recovery. And he pointed toward the work of the state Office of Drug Control Policy, established in 2017 and now budgeted for $2.3 million annually.

But Samples, a former deputy director for the state’s health and human resources agency, also took note of the billions of dollars in expenditures already dedicated to reducing drug problems and yet “we’ve led the nation since 2010 and every year since in fatal overdose deaths. In fact, we’ve seen exponential growth in that rate since that time.”

His presentation was filled with eye-popping statistics:

— An estimated 208,000 people in West Virginia used illicit drugs in the last month, according to a survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

— Overall, the age-adjusted drug overdose death in the United States quadrupled from 2002 to 2022.

— There were 107,941 drug overdose deaths in 2022.

— West Virginia experienced 1,335 known overdose deaths in 2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

— From 1999 to 2022, West Virginia’s overdose deaths increased 1,680%.

“We can’t sustain that, as a society,” Samples said. “It’s crippling to the state.”

West Virginia’s overdose death rate is 151% higher than the best state in the country, Samples said. It’s 85.6% higher than the national average. And 36.4% higher than the next worst state.

“It’s hard to be positive when you’re juxtaposing yourself against other states this way and seeing that you’re continuing to fall behind,” he said.

He said the effects are now multi-generational, with hundreds of millions of dollars in indirect costs in child welfare alone.

West Virginia leads the nation in neonatal abstinence syndrome,  caused when a baby experiences withdrawal from drug exposure in the womb before birth, he said, and the state leads the nation in in utero substance exposure. Only about 17,000 babies are born each year in West Virginia.

“And of those 17,000 births, we’re looking at about 2,500 babies every year that are exposed to drugs in the womb. So extrapolate that out over a decade or more and you start to see the demographic tsunami that is coming,” Samples said. “It’s a crisis.”

Samples noted that lawmakers have passed a series of policies intended to address many of these issues, and he said they could pass more — including some that he recommended.

“But it really doesn’t matter because the most important thing we need to do, in my opinion, is that we need to measure what matters so that we can then pivot and organically improve our response to this crisis,” Samples said.

“We need to measure every aspect of our substance abuse disorder policies and expenditures, and we need to tie it back to a core societal measure.”

He proposed measuring overdose deaths, in utero substance exposure, infectious disease rate of spread, child fatality or near fatality rate of drugs.

“These are really what people care about.”

He added, “Why am I even here today? It’s not because of some process issue. It’s because people are sick of what’s happening in their communities. They’re sick of their loved ones dying. They’re sick of people they know, struggling year after year. We need to start measuring and setting goals for ourselves and holding ourselves to those goals, then if we miss those marks then we need to explain why.”

The legislative committee also heard from Jonathan Board, executive director of the West Virginia First Foundation, which has more than $225 million on hand to put toward relief efforts for the effects of drug addiction.

“We know that we cannot just check boxes here or there,” Board told lawmakers. “In many respects we are walking through cemeteries every day, and we understand that each and every dollar we have is because of a loved one who has been lost or horribly affected by this public health crisis.”

And the committee heard from the new executive director of the Office of Drug Control Policy, Dr. Stephen Loyd, who was appearing on his first day on the job.

“West Virginia has been ground zero for the opioid crisis. It’s where it started; it’s where it’s continued today,” Loyd said. “And there have been a lot of really great people in this state that have worked hard, and for a lot of whatever reasons we are where we are.

“I think it would be a great thing if West Virginia showed the rest of the country how to get out of this crisis.”

Hawks Nest Tunnel is a landmark in West Virginia — a place in Fayette County, West Virginia, where much of the New River is diverted through a mountain to generate hydropower before it rejoins the river near Gauley Bridge. It’s also the site of a historic workplace disaster. 

The site and its legacy now are the subject of a new photography book. It’s titled Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster. It features the photos of Raymond Thompson Jr., an artist, educator, and journalist now based in Austin, Texas. Inside Appalachia host Mason Adams reached out to Thompson to learn more.

Adams: So your book is Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster. It was published this spring. For those unfamiliar, can you describe Hawk’s Nest tunnel and what happened there?

Thompson: In West Virginia in the 1930s, there was a construction project to divert the New River, and in that project, they were building a dam to divert the river, and they also were building a powerhouse roughly three-and-a-half miles downstream, and they also were building a tunnel to connect the dam in a powerhouse. To do that, they needed to dig through a mountainside, essentially. While they were digging through the mountainside, they came across a portion of silica rock. Because they were using improper drilling techniques, using dry drills like rock filled with silica, it kicked up a lot of silica dust, and many of the men working in a tunnel would have contracted silicosis. Silicosis, once it gets into your lungs, pretty much just destroys your lungs and you slowly suffocate. It’s thought that roughly there are 5,000 workers in total who worked on the project, and roughly 3,000 of those workers are actually working underground and in the tunnel. A demographer has put the number of potential workers who have died roughly around 764 people, which would make the Hawks Nest disaster one of the worst disasters in US history.

Adams: How did you first become aware of the story of these workers who excavated Hawks Nest tunnel?

Thompson: I was working at West Virginia University for their alumni magazine, and we would often get books from West Virginia University Press to review. My coworker brought me a copy of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, with this intro essay by Catherine Venable Moore. I got to it and began to read it, and I was super fascinated by the story. One thing I forgot to add earlier was that of those 3000 workers, roughly two thirds of the men who worked in the tunnel were African American. When I got this book from my coworker, I was reading Catherine’s essay. I was reading Muriel Rukeyer’s work, which is really fascinating. It’s a book of poetry, but I always think of Muriel Rukeyser as a journalist poet. She went into the field and reported like a reporter would for a typical written piece. Instead of just producing articles, she produced this book of poetry about what happened in the place that, combined with Catherine Venable Moore’s really beautiful essay about navigating the space, just captured my imagination. Maybe a year or a year-and-a-half after that I actually got to meet Katherine and get a tour of Hawks Nest locations, which really, really hooked me to this story. I knew that I wanted to do something to talk about what happened in this space.

Adams: It’s kind of wild. This huge industrial disaster, which is what it is when you look at it from this distance, is forgotten in a lot of circles, but you can see this chain of how the memory has been kept alive, from Muriel Rukeyser collecting poems about some of the tragedy’s victims and how it’s affecting the families in The Book of the Dead,” to Catherine Venable Moore’s further work going there and matching the poems to the area, to now your photography. How does that feel, to build on that chain of work and give more attention to this tragedy that’s been forgotten by so many people? 

Thompson: I was totally building on the people who came before me in this work. With my role, I was super fascinated by the visual archive that was surrounding Hawks Nest. I found that when I began just to do a little bit of research into what visually existed around Hawks Nest, and oftentimes I couldn’t find African Americans represented in stories that were out there. I was super curious, like, ‘Where are they in these spaces?” In the visual archive itself, you can see little glimpses, little threads of their existence in the space. I knew that I wanted to start from this point, right? But also, at the same time, this is the beautiful thing about storytelling. It’s a beautiful thing about photography, about arts, about journalism, that it’s all cumulative. We’re all building on each other. None of us is this in vacuums. It takes more than one brick to build a house or wall, you know? And I feel like my project is one brick, along with Catherine’s brick, along with Muriel Rukeyer’s brick, and hopefully many others after me who might take up the story. The book itself is, I call it a “speculative archive,” but like a speculative visual archive. It’s this combination of images that I’ve made,  images that I’ve constructed, images that I just found through direct observation of looking at the landscape around Hawks Nest, archival images from the archive, and it’s filled with writing: a couple poems and a lot of historical details about the Hawks Nest tunnel. It almost feels like a collage experience, in some ways, but I feel like this is another way for us to open up what’s possible in our understanding of history, understanding of West Virginia and understanding of Appalachia.

Adams: One thing that just strikes me when I consider your book and Murial Rukeyser’s work is the value of art, not only in helping people process what happened, but in documenting it and tracking the landscape and the human impact outside of official company records.

Thompson: Yeah. Archival records are interesting things, because we often look at them as these primary source documents, as truth in a way, that come from history. But we always have to remember that each archival record was made with a purpose, made by a person behind a record who had a point of view. And if we don’t know what that point of view is, then we have to be very careful with those records when looking at them. Art is one of the ways to look at these records and try to both see the truth of who made it, but then also realize it’s a double-edged sword. It was made for a purpose, but then it could be reused to tell a different story.

Adams: I want to quote a line from Anita Jones Cecil, who’s the granddaughter in one of the families that was involved. This is from Catherine’s essay. Anita says, “”they actively sought people who were poor, who were desperate and uneducated, and shipped them up here. Expendable people. People that nobody would miss.” And that was a descendant of a family of white workers who still received roughly twice as much money as the black workers did. I appreciate photographers for your eyes and what you can see and capture that a lot of us don’t see. So as a photographer and a human being, when you look back on this tragedy, what do you see? 

Thompson: It’s an interesting question, because I think almost naturally, we tend to want to focus on the negative. We know a number of lives lost. We know the extraction from the landscape and how the landscape has been changed. We can see the violence. If you’ve ever traveled in that area around Hawks Nest State Park, you have a river and then you have these dries. All the water is gone, which creates another sort of recreational space, but it’s almost like a weird little scab on the earth where water should be. We have all this, the disaster that’s in our face all the time, and the violence that’s in the landscape. For my method and how I’m working, I need to recognize that and embrace that violence in the landscape, but then also find the light. And for me, that light came in just interacting with these archival records, finding these threads of these African American men in the archive, popping them out through my artwork and my process, and taking a picture that initially was meant to document an industrial process — it was never about the people — and popping those men out and making that image about them again so we could remember who they are. And in those images, you can see lives. You can see desires and needs in those images. So for me, that is the light of this. It’s where I find hope, is the that these just weren’t victims, they were people with full lives, and to learn how to look at people with this wider embrace,

Adams: This is emotionally heavy material. It’s hard to read these poems, and to read Catherine’s work and to look at these images, but this work required you to spend lengths of time immersed in that material, in that world. What wisdom do you take away from that work?

Thompson: We live in this super-digital age where we see things through other mediated experiences, whether it’s from the phone or even from a book. For me, it was the importance of actually showing up to the space, and then taking that quiet time to look at something out of our busy digital lives, to pay homage to a space and with these people on your mind. It feels almost religious or spiritual in a way. It’s a way of paying honor to what’s happened in these spaces, even though there’s nothing really in that landscape that points directly at that, or them or their presence, but almost taking time to sense it. It’s almost like an honoring of the ancestors in a way. I think it’s important in our busy digital lives, to slow down and make time to do that.

Adams: What are you working on now? How did this experience change the shape of how you view your photography?

Thompson: Working on Appalachian Ghost required me to use archives in creative ways, to use archives as threads to create a new work. I’m currently applying that technique now, just in a different place. I’m wrapping up a project in North Carolina, where I again use archival records. That’s visual records like archival runaway slave ads, and using the information in those runaway slave ads, and visiting the locations that are mentioned in the ads. When I was working on Appalachian Ghosts, I was looking for ghosts in the landscape. And I’m doing it again in North Carolina — this time using runaway slave ads as my reference and trying to learn how to look at the landscape through their eyes. That project is called, “It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel.” So again, it’s this revisiting of a landscape that has a really, really hard history. One thing that’s different this time is that my family has roots in these locations that I’m working currently. So I did take a much more personal look at the archive in a space where I have blood connections to the land.