In wake of family tragedy, Bears RB Tarik Cohen finds new purpose

A recent family tragedy has given Bears running back Tarik Cohen a new perspective and inspiration for the upcoming season.

When Cohen reports to training camp next week, he’ll be mentally and physically ready. But he’ll also arrive with a heavy heart.

In early June, Dante Norman, Cohen’s younger half-brother, was shot in Raleigh, North Carolina. As a result, he’s paralyzed from the waist down.

The news was heartbreaking for Cohen. It stopped him right in his tracks.

“I feel like I was injured also,” Cohen said Monday at his youth football ProCamp at Elk Grove High School. “Someone I’ve been around my whole life. I feel like we’re one. He’s not a different person; we’re the same person. So if anything affects him, it affects me. That’s my little brother. I’ve done my best to protect him his whole life. So then when this happened, it was like a culture shock to me.”

Cohen has been trying to visit Norman as much as possible, while maintaining his rigorous strength-and-conditioning schedule.

“I just want to do things for him,” Cohen said. “I want to just, I know it’s not possible, but I feel like I want to walk for him.”

For more than a month, only a few people were aware of the situation. Cohen didn’t plan to share the news with the public.

But that tack changed last weekend when Cohen saw a young, cheerful camper in a wheelchair at a youth football camp he was hosting at his alma mater, North Carolina A&T, in Greensboro, North Carolina.

“I saw my brother in him,” Cohen said. “And I just saw how much fun he was having.

‘‘And it just made me think of my brother and how his life is going to be.

“It just came out; I wasn’t planning to say it or anything.”

During his first two seasons with the Bears, Cohen has visited at-risk youngsters in Chicago. He shares his personal and trying story of growing up in a single-parent household in rural North Carolina.

He said he feels compelled to share his experiences to encourage students to aspire for more like he did.

Cohen has been inspired by the way Norman has handled everything the last month.

“My little brother, every time he sees me, he tells me he’s ready to start his rehab and things like that,” Cohen said. “He knows he can bounce back, and just hearing that lets me know that he’s a warrior. I don’t know how I would act in that situation. I would be dwelling on what happened, but he’s ready to get at it and get back to his normal self. So it’s really pushing me through.”

Cohen has high expectations for the 2019 season after making his first Pro Bowl appearance. And now, he has a new motivation.

“He’s my purpose,” Cohen said of Norman. “They’ve always been my purpose, my brothers and my mom, that’s my dominant family that I grew up seeing every day. But I feel like it adds a little more fuel to the fire now.”