After his death, his music & passion live on

Story by: Sophie Whisnant

Photo by: Alice Hudson

WILMINGTON, North Carolina– God was on his side.

That’s what Julius Cole Rassin, 22, wrote in the note he left a week before his body was found in the Cape Fear River last February.

Rassin was a vibrant musician, just beginning to fulfill his potential. His guitar playing electrified the room. His brilliant smile made girls do a double take. His heart was huge, and he lent support to anyone in need.

“He felt like he was going to change the world through his music,” his mother, Mary Jones, said.

His life seemed so perfect.

Until it wasn’t. A mental illness, hidden under the cover of his burgeoning talent, began to rise to the surface.

Rassin’s death was ruled an accidental drowning. But his legacy – to change the world through music – is alive, thanks to his friends and family.

Growing up

Jones said her son was singing since birth.

“He would dance in his car seat,” Jones said. “He loved music.”

Rassin got his first guitar one Christmas around age 8 or 9. The music came naturally to him. He started writing songs and sharing them with people.

“He felt like he was going to change the world through his music,” Jones said.

Joe Basquill, who first met Rassin in preschool, reconnected with him in community theater. They started playing music and writing together. The young men quickly became like brothers.

“He was really into talking about his own soul,” Basquill said. “He didn’t write very many love songs, he wrote more about what he saw in the world. Which, I guess, would be his love songs to the world.”

While he took to the local stage and wrote with Basquill in his childhood room, Rassin also posted songs on YouTube, developing his own fan base.

As Rassin posted, he realized many of his fans struggled with their own self-worth, so he wrote “Beautiful” to remind them that beauty is on the inside.

Many in Rassin’s growing fan base needed to hear his message, but none more than one long-time fan of his who posted on YouTube telling her audience that she planned to commit suicide. Rassin noticed, and his care-taking mode took over.

“She had never met Cole, and he saved her life,” Jones said. “They stayed in touch, and he flew out in 2015 and went to prom with her.”

Eventually a talent scout discovered Rassin on YouTube. He was invited to move to Los Angeles and join a new boy band, making music professionally.

What seemed like Rassin’s big break would become what some friends considered to be the start of his downfall.

From LA to hardship

Leaving the comfort of his hometown, Rassin went to LA, fulfilling a lifelong dream. It wasn’t long before reality hit.

The man who recruited Rassin for his boyband project was leaving the group high and dry. While the musicians wrote songs and paid for him to be their manager, nothing was happening. Eventually the band members realized they were being scammed.

This, coupled with sudden changes in his home life, is what Basquill thinks prompted personality changes in his lifelong friend.

Coming back to Wilmington and eventually moving in with Basquill, Rassin started showing interest in things that seemed out of character. Basquill said his friend seemed positive about his LA experience, but looking back, something deeper was going on.

“He wasn’t able to really face it, and so he pushed it down even though I think it really hurt his confidence and really took a toll on him creatively,” Basquill said.

It was during this time that Basquill first started to pick up on a heightened spirituality that seemed out of place. Basquill said that while hanging out with friends, Rassin would randomly share his thoughts on spirituality, or play guitar out of nowhere.

“He was getting into energies,” Basquill said. “He was really into Eastern philosophies and opening his mind and stuff. At the time it seemed normal, but he really believed it.”

Rassin started to drift apart from old friends. His appearance was changing, his buzz cut and beard a stark contrast from the clean-cut boy band looks he had.

Rassin began playing guitar and singing in downtown Wilmington for passersby. He performed both professionally for local businesses and on his own time with an open guitar case for donations.

He made a new friend, Sunny Platt, who said she felt a deeper, soulmate-like connection with Rassin from the start. The two would write music and go to open mic nights together.

“He really was the epitome of ‘lights up a room,’” Platt said. “It’s a cliché but there’s no other way to describe him as a person and as a being. I’ve become more and more aware of our little soul ties even after he passed.”

She still listens to his music every day. She witnessed Rassin during what she would call a peak time in his life. He was musically inspired. Rassin wrote a song for her, “Sunny,” the same year he was diagnosed with his mental illness.

But it wouldn’t be too long until his mental health took a turn for the worse.

A diagnosis

In 2016, Rassin was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a chronic condition associated with symptoms of schizophrenia and mood disorder.

Mary Jones began noticing her son’s behavior and spirituality had become a problem.

“It got to the point where he believed he was Moses reincarnated,” Jones said. “He hallucinated where he said he was fighting battles to protect us.”

Rassin grew out his hair and beard. He stopped bathing. The once picture-perfect looks were gone.

Medication never worked for Rassin. Jones said. Abilify, an antipsychotic drug, particularly made him hear bad voices, when he normally heard beautiful things.

He started sleeping under a picnic table near a church. Jones said her son’s choice to be homeless broke her heart.

The congregation and staff at the St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church took Rassin under their wing. He started attending services and he became close with the people there.

“Everything for him was about God,” Jones said. “I mean, a lot of it was being delusional, but it centered around love.”

While spending time there, Rassin began playing the piano more often.

“He had taken a few (piano) lessons, not really many, but as his condition progressed he played the piano more and became an incredible pianist,” Jones said. “It was truly amazing to me.”

After one adverse drug reaction, Rassin went to bed listening to classical music and awoke with a composition of what was going on in his head. He was able to play it for his mom, a home video she now treasures.

Looking to catch up with longtime friend and fellow musician Hannah Laham, Rassin asked Laham to meet him at Kat 5 Kava, a downtown hangout of his, on a February afternoon. At the last minute, Laham realized she couldn’t make it.

That was the last place anyone ever saw him.

Rassin was missing for about a week. He’d left the note and vanished, prompting search parties in Wilmington.

He was found in the Cape Fear River Feb. 24, 2018, the victim of what was ruled an accidental drowning. Friends speculate Rassin was determined to swim that river, one with nature, in God’s eye.

Laham and Basquill remember comments from Rassin that made it seem like he knew his time on Earth was finite. He had an urgency to do things. He had to play this now, write this now, help someone now.

“I think Cole knew what his destiny was and that he was only going to be on this earth a short time, and he was willing to put everything into it,” Jones said. “And I’m so proud of him. He touched so many lives.”

Music Heals Minds comes to life

After Rassin’s death, his parents gave some of his unfinished songs to Laham. That gave her the opportunity to collaborate with the friend she called her brother. She took the pieces and started making songs for an album.

Laham worked with other musicians in Tennessee to put together the album, “Sunny Day,” under her stage name, Hannah Kol. She knew she wanted proceeds from the album and concert she held to go to a cause that could help people like Rassin.

With the help of her mom and with Rassin’s parents’ blessing, she put together Music Heals Minds, a group dedicated to helping youth and young adults with mental illness through music. Laham collects gently used instruments and then distributes them to mental health facilities like the ones Rassin spent time in.

Equipping people with instruments seemed like the perfect way to continue his memory as a gifted, loving musician. While Music Heals Minds has only made one big distribution run so far, the group has already noticed results.

“For the first time ever these patients are now going to the group meetings because it isn’t about sitting there and talking about your mental illness, it’s about playing music,” Jones said. “They’re going to get a band together, and they’re writing about what they’re struggling with, and they said for the first time since they developed their illness they feel normal.”

For more information about Music Heals Minds, visit musichealsminds.com or follow it on Instagram, @musichealsmind.

Sophie Whisnant

Sophie is a senior in the UNC School of Media and Journalism studying reporting. From Wilmington, North Carolina, Sophie has worked at the Wilmington Star-News as a Gatehouse Media intern. She has also interned at Creative Loafing, a lifestyle magazine, based in Charlotte. Sophie is pursuing a career in entertainment writing for a magazine.

2 Comments
  1. I had Cole when he was 3 years old and never forget him. He was precious & entertaining. I never saw him again so when I thinK of him I see the cute 3 year old I had. He was special then & now.

  2. This story is both sad, heartbreaking and inspirational all at the same time. I have cried….I have smiled….I have hurt for him and his family and friends. May God continue to bless us with his music and his presence in all our hearts!!