Mother warding off anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists after son’s death

PULASKI, Tenn. (WKRN) — The son of a grieving mother is being used as a poster child on anti-vaccine sites and she wants to clear up the false accusations.

Janaye Creecy said several websites are using her story and family photos for political use, insinuating her son died from the COVID-vaccine. 

The Pulaski mother found the unsettling posts as she made plans to bury her child while still waiting on an autopsy to find out why 15-year-old Quinton Cox died.   

“He was the most kind and gentle person that anybody could ever meet. He had a beautiful heart, everybody saw it,” Creecy said while looking at a painting she made of her son.

Through a paint brush, Creecy found some peace making a portrait of her child.

“Now that I look at it, I realize I painted him sad and, you know, the picture didn’t have an emotion, but the sadness kind of shows,” she explained.

Her emotion shines through the watercolors after she found Quinton in his bedroom on Jan. 27.

“When I went in, I thought he had fell asleep in his chair, but, unfortunately, that was not the case,” Creecy said, adding he was still holding his video game controller and wearing his headphones. 

Still unsure of how her son died, Creecy posted about her loss on her personal Facebook page.

“About a day after I made the post, I started noticing some really bizarre comments, and they were talking about the vaccine and how I should have known better than to give my child the vaccine and implying that it was my fault that he died because of that, and I had no idea where it was coming from at first. I was like, ‘Where is this coming from? I know my friends aren’t posting this. I don’t know these people.’ Some of them, I looked at their pages and they were from New Zealand and Canada and all sorts of places,” Creecy said.

As she looked further into where the comments were coming from, she found several anti-vaccine websites were using a photo of her son wearing a mask, along with a picture of her insinuating the COVID-vaccine was to blame for Quinton’s death.

“We started Googling once we saw the first article and realized that it was on X, it was on Telegraph, it was on, oh God, there were so many. There were so many that we pulled up where it was being shared and reposted and commented on, and it was just horrible to know that somebody’s taking that story about you and your child and using it to try to scare people when they don’t know anything about what happened,” she explained. 

Deepening the heartache, Creecy said Quinton’s father died from COVID-19 complications in 2020.

“First I was angry because I know how angry my son would be at the idea that they were using his picture for that, but then it was just heartbreaking as well because there were so many posts coming to say mean, hurtful things at the worst time in my life. There is nothing, nothing worse for a parent than losing a child. There’s no pain deeper than that, and then to have people tell you that it’s your fault, that you did something, I can’t imagine how people could do that,” she said. “Nobody should have to bury their child, but also nobody should have to bury their child and be viciously attacked over and over again by people who don’t even know you and steal your child’s identity to make a political statement of some kind, because it’s just not the time for that. I can’t bring my son back. There’s nothing on the face of this planet that I can do to save him or to help him, but I could speak for him.” 

Creecy believes her son may have had an enlarged heart, saying he also suffered from sleep apnea. However, she is waiting on an autopsy to uncover exactly how Quinton died.