Alix Reese remained tough, funny, artistic after 2010 shooting paralyzed her

There had been so many other close calls. Each time, she clawed her way back.

Alexandria “Alix” Reese, 34, had weathered more than her share of dark days after she was shot May 27, 2010, on the Near East Side.

Sunday was not one of them.

She had dinner with her mother and stepfather, Nancy and Tony Cox. They watched a movie. Nancy gave her daughter a mani-pedi.

All in all, it was a good day, Tony said.

On Monday morning, the nurses at the rehab center on Karl Road couldn’t wake Alix. Paramedics took her to Mount Carmel St. Ann’s hospital, where doctors reported what they already had guessed. Another opportunistic infection had led to sepsis. By that evening, she was dead.

“We’re in shock,” Tony said Tuesday. “You would think after the better part of nine years, you’d be ready. No. No, we’re not.”

The better part of nine years. Sometimes it must have felt like an eternity had passed since the night she inadvertently drove into a gang feud at Trevitt and Atcheson streets, and a stray bullet severed her spine. Alix, then 25, had been giving a friend a ride, and they had gotten lost. That was all it took.

It was six years before police charged two gang

members, Drakkar D. Groce and William R. Griffin. The two pleaded guilty with an agreement from prosecutors that if Alix died, they would not be charged with her murder. Groce is serving 36 years for the shooting and a drug case. Griffin served two years and is already out.

Once, Alix posted some “things you need to know about me” on Instagram. It is worth sharing again.

“I’m Virgo by name, Leo at heart. I hate being identified by my injury, not individually. I hate people feeling sorry for me, I’m a strongass woman ... My favorite color is black and I love cats. I’ve dyed my hair black since I was 18 ... I get depressed just like everyone else, I have a hard time sharing it with others ... My biggest pet Tony Cox, on stepdaughter Alix Reese’s death

peeve as a quadriplegic is not being able to scratch what itches.”

I first met her in 2011, while reporting a series on gun violence. Write or speak out about any facet of gun violence, and you will draw the ire of critics who see it as an attack on the Second Amendment. Alix showed her mettle by writing a rebuttal.

“Hey,” she began. “My name is Alix, and it’s me in the Sunday Dispatch article ‘Overrun by guns,’ and video, which obviously many people didn’t actually read or watch; otherwise they wouldn’t possibly say such horrid and negative things ... The word I hoped to spread was the fact that there are so many of these crimes of violence that, as a

community, we have become desensitized to them, and the situation can only get worse if we continue to ignore them.”

That was Alix. “What always struck me was that she was always true to her principles,” Tony said.

Alix became a vegetarian only a month or so before she was shot, and remained one until her death. She wanted to avoid visiting suffering on other living things however she could, he said.

She was an artist before and after. She learned to hold her paintbrushes between her teeth. Clench your jaw and try to imagine that.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Tony said of his stepdaughter’s death. “But on the other

“It’s heartbreaking. But on the other hand, I’m glad that wherever she is, she’s free of all that suffering and constraint, because she didn’t deserve that.”

hand, I’m glad that wherever she is, she’s free of all that suffering and constraint, because she didn’t deserve that.”

At the point where it intersects with Trevitt Street, Atcheson runs straight in both directions. On a night the better part of nine years ago, it became an ugly fork in the road.

Earlier that day, Alix had enrolled in Columbus State Community College’s earlychildhood-development program. The week before that, she had applied for a job at a day-care center. She learned later that she would have been hired.

A life upended for nothing. But Alix was still Alix. Tough and funny and artistic.

Despite her injury, she never sat still, not in the way that mattered most. She kept moving forward, as long as she was able.