Cooper Roberts, Child Victim of Highland Park Shooting, receives a Specially Adapted Bike from Project Mobility!

Cooper is finally back home! We are at a total loss of words to express how filled with gratitude, love and wholeness we now feel given that we are able to finally have Cooper back at home. There was a time, not all that long ago, where we were desperately and feverishly praying just for Cooper to live. To be able to have Cooper home and our family all reunited together again is such an amazing blessing. He is able to live once again with his twin brother, Luke, and resume being one another's very best playmates. You take for granted how wonderful it is to be able to have all your children together and how important they are to each other until it is taken away. Having our children reunited as a sibling unit and knowing that they can be together whenever they need or want to, is so special to us and to Cooper. They have held each other up and through so much during what has been the most horrific time in their lives. They have seen, in a way they never had before, just how much they enrich each other's lives and how deep their love for one another truly is. It has been an honor and a privilege as their parents to watch all six of them lean on and lift each other up throughout this devastating ordeal. We are so proud of the human beings that they are, and Cooper is so happy to be home with them.

We know that Cooper continues to face a heartbreakingly cruel and unfair road ahead. The transition to having Cooper's extensive medical needs being addressed at home vs. at the hospital or rehabilitation clinic is a gigantic learning curve for all of us. And, now that he is home, Cooper has to deal on a daily basis with the sadness and grief of recognizing all the things he's lost - all that he used to be able to do at his house, in his community, that he cannot do anymore ... playgrounds he cannot play on, sports he cannot physically play the way he used to, a backyard he cannot play in the same way he used to, a bike in the garage that sits idle, that we used to have to fight him to stop riding each day... even much of his own home which he cannot access. For all the love that he has come back to, there are so many painful reminders of what he has lost. There is no word that we know of that adequately describes the level of pain you feel or that Cooper feels when he sees his bike he can no longer ride or his old soccer jersey...heartbreaking, agonizing, despair - there is just not a painful enough description.