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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Loss pushes Freeman grad to help others


Justin Fox will graduate from Freeman High School this spring.  
 (Jesse Tinsley / The Spokesman-Review)
Stefanie Pettit Correspondent

Justin Fox has seen how things can go wrong when kids lose their father. And he doesn’t like when that happens.

The Freeman High School senior lost his birth father, Alan Fox, to cancer when he was 1. And his stepfather, Rich Stokes, with whom he was close, was one of the workers who died in an explosion at the Coeur d’Alene Casino Resort Hotel in Worley, Idaho, two years ago.

Fox, 19, isn’t sure how he didn’t run into trouble himself. “I just focused on staying true to what he (his stepfather) saw in me,” Fox said. “He told me he was proud of me on several occasions. A lot of my friends party a lot. I just never got into that. A personal choice.”

While he managed to hold things together, he has friends who made bad choices under circumstances when their fathers became absent in one way or another. “I’d like to teach people in those same situations how to handle things,” Fox said.

Another motivation for him is the experience he had when his sister Robin lived at the family home in Rockford for the first few years after the birth of her son, Trent, now 4. He developed a strong bond with his nephew.

Seeing some of his friends get in trouble and loving Trent has shown him that he wants to work with children in some capacity, especially troubled teens, he said.

What Fox does now is spend time at the middle school and elementary school in the Freeman School District working with students. There is one seventh-grader with dyslexia and epilepsy who he helps with math, and he works with other students in study hall, assisting with whatever their particular academic and life skill needs are.

“When I volunteered to go down to the middle school, I went online to teaching Web sites to help prepare myself,” he said. Fox also lends a hand at the elementary school.

At school, he’s participated in track and field for four years, specializing in the discus. For out-of-school fun, he plays guitar and spends time fixing up his 1973 Land Cruiser: “For my birthday, I asked for sheet metal so I could fix up the rust spots on the car.”

He’ll go to work after graduation and plans to go to college later, hoping for a career in child psychology. He’d like to go to the University of Fairbanks, although he’s never been to Alaska. His stepfather had once lived there and loved it.

Fox recalls a special trip when he was 15 – a nine-hour hike into a cabin at Priest Lake in North Idaho with his mother, Cindy, and his stepfather.

“The plan is that when my nephew turns 15, I’ll take him on that same hike,” Fox said. “My mother laughs and jokes that we’ll have to helicopter her in by then.”

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