Nothing on your cell phone is worth someone’s life

Makenzee Cupp

By Denee and Jess Cupp

It was March 1, 2021, and our daughter was on her way home from college, weeks away from graduating culinary school at the top of her class and ready to begin her lifetime dream. 

Our lives were immediately torn apart when a negligent driver on his phone ended her life and changed our lives forever. He never saw the flashing red lights or the stop sign when he barreled through the intersection of KS Highway 4 and U.S. Highway 283 in La Crosse, Kansas, and killed our daughter, Makenzee Kathleen Cupp, who was 19 years old.

She was known by most as Kenz or Kenzee and was a blessing to those who knew her. Kenzee’s heart was as big as Texas; that’s where she was born. She loved to cook with her daddy from the time she could walk. We opened our family restaurant in 2008 in Ness City, Kansas, and Kenz always worked in the kitchen with her dad. Her younger brother, Jay, and I ran the front. We moved to Bazine, Kansas, in 2006 to raise our kids as farm kids and teach them life skills. We loved how almost everyone waved or nodded when you passed them driving down the road. Now, we mostly only see the tops of people’s heads as we pass them, and we have to drive very defensively and hope we don’t get hit by someone looking down at their phone. 

Kenzee was the former president of Ness City High School’s Future Farmers of American (FFA) chapter and the Southwest Kansas FFA District secretary. She loved growing and raising her own food, literally farm to table. She enjoyed cooking and baking many different things, but her favorite was making sauce with her dad. She wanted the whole world to enjoy generations of goodness in this sweet and a little spicy, universal sauce. 

She sold her baked goods locally from the time she was eight and would sell out every time. She would make several batches of her famous cookies and pies to earn money to go on every one of her FFA trips, and there were A LOT of them.  Kenz was always there to volunteer to cook at the FFA community breakfast and loved feeding people.

Through God’s grace, we attempt daily to repurpose our pain into passion by carrying on Kenzee’s dream. Kenzee showed her love and compassion for people through her food. To bring her dream to life and honor Kenzee, we established MKC’s Kitchen LLC, a licensed commercial kitchen built on our family farm to create and build our daughter Makenzee’s legacy.

We create and manufacture her products for profit, but a portion of the proceeds go back to our non-profit organization, kenzeecares.org, to be able to continue to feed people through our Bless A Meal program. This program blesses others with a home-cooked meal, from our kitchen to yours. For more information about Kenzee’s story and her products, go to mkckitchen.com and kenzeecares.org to find out how she wanted to make a difference, and you can too. 

We also want to educate and bring awareness of the distraction of cell phones while driving. So many lives have been taken from families that are changed forever because someone was checking their phone.  We want to prevent this heartbreak and devastation from happening to other families. 

Nothing on your cell phone is worth someone’s life.

 Denee and Jess Cupp are Kenzee’s parents.