Leavenworth County
Died: March 10, 2023
Everything changed in 2020.’ A ‘great kid’ who struggled during pandemic.
Caleb was 18 months old when he arrived at his foster home in Leavenworth.
And the connection was immediate, said Vanessa Jackson, who with her husband Todd would later adopt Caleb and his older biological brother.
“He was so crazy cute,” Jackson said of Caleb as a toddler. “He had the biggest brown eyes and the most ornery grin. … He was just so charming.”
The kind of kid who wasn’t going to outright break a rule, but find a way to bend it a bit. Like the Jackson house rule about no eating in the living room. Food stayed in the kitchen.
“So he would lay on the floor, he would have his bowl of cereal in the kitchen to where his bottom half would be in the living room to prove to me he could do it the way he wanted and I was wrong,” Jackson said, laughing at the memory. “It was endearing, especially when he was a little boy. When he got older it got harder and more challenging, for sure.”
After his death in March from fentanyl, the memories are what she and her family keep close. His time in Boy Scouts when he was younger, or when he was the kicker for the school’s football team, or his days wrestling, which became his favorite sport.
Playing sports was always his incentive to do the work in the classroom.
“Everything changed in 2020,” she said.
When schools and activities shut down because of the pandemic, Jackson started to see the decline. There no longer was that “incentive to do something he liked,” she said.
“All he could do, really, was video games,” she said. “And I wanted to take them away from him but that was the only thing he did.”
At 17, when he thought rules at home became too much, he moved in with a friend. Then with Jackson’s sister.
“He was a great kid, he had so much potential,” Jackson said. “He was my hope. I saw him either being a leader in the military or doing something just really great. He had so much potential because he had so many natural talents that some of us wish we were born with, especially his athletics or just his wit.
“There’s so many people and families that are dealing with these kinds of things that people just don’t talk about. You want to pretend like there’s no problem, you know what I mean? But we’re having to talk about it. We’re having to share his story and our struggles.
“And I think it’s helping us find purpose in the pain.”
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