![]() After that they found a family in Indiana who wanted him.įor all intents and purposes, RODS began right there. Then they found a kid in Lithuania with Down syndrome named Eli who was languishing in an orphanage. In 2011, when Nash was four, they mounted a campaign at Christmastime among family and friends to raise enough money to cover the cost of an international adoption. It became Brady and Andrea’s crusade to do something about that. The chances of these kids getting adopted were practically nil. He saw photographs of four-year-olds that couldn’t walk because they’d been left in a crib in an orphanage their whole life. In learning all he could about Nash’s condition, Brady came across some alarming statistics: in many less developed countries around the world, when a child is born with Down syndrome they are immediately abandoned. The Murrays embraced the Down syndrome community as earnestly as they embraced their son. One of my most cherished pictures is her holding Nash at that moment.” ![]() She smiled and said, ‘Great, can I hold my boy?’ And it was like that with her. I took a couple of minutes, gathered myself, took him over to Andrea, who had just gone through labor and given birth, and said, ‘Honey, the doctor told us Nash has Down syndrome.’ Her reaction was the foundation for what our experience has been with Nash. Here’s how Brady tells what happened next: ![]() What people with Down syndrome can teach us about living in the moment As adults, people with Down syndrome typically have the mental capacity of an eight or nine year old. Ten minutes after he was born, the doctor informed Brady that Nash had Down syndrome, the genetic disorder caused by the appearance of an extra chromosome that dramatically slows down growth rate. To trace back to the origins of RODS - Racing for Orphans with Down Syndrome – you need to rewind to July of 2007 when Nash, the second of the Murrays’ seven children, joined the family. It has a full-time staff, filled with social media gurus, marketing experts and other communications professionals to push the cause forward 24-7.Īnd then there’s Brady and Andrea, who aren’t asking anyone to do something they wouldn’t do - or haven’t done - themselves. They have a charity, called RODS Heroes, and it’s not something they get around to on the odd weekend or during the holidays. Meet the Murrays, a 40-something husband and wife who live in Highland, Utah, and have made it their life’s mission to provide families for unwanted kids with special needs, Down syndrome in particular. Their response: “It was us who hit the jackpot!” | Laura Seitz, Deseret Newsīrady and Andrea Murray have lost track of how many times they’ve heard that phrase, or some variation thereof, when people meet their 11-year-old son, Cooper, and learn his story: that he was four years old when Brady and Andrea found him, abandoned on a street corner in Tianjin, China, because he was born with Down syndrome. Murray is the founder and president of Racing for Orphans with Down Syndrome (RODS Racing), a nonprofit dedicated to helping orphaned children who have Down syndrome find loving homes. ![]() Brady Murray holds photographs of his sons, Nash, 15, and Cooper, 11, in his office in Lehi on Friday, March 10, 2023.
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