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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KDVR) — A Colorado veteran has paid tribute to Gannon Stauch, the 11-year-old boy who captured the attention of people worldwide with his disappearance and murder. 

FOX31’s Nicole Fierro and Byron Stewart took a trip to Colorado Springs to see the owner of Bopat Guitars, who had a unique way of honoring Stauch.

If you judge a musician by the guitar they play, then Bob Rogers is strumming the right strings. The life-long musician and carpenter combined his two passions to create his own custom-made guitars. Rogers’ technique struck a chord with musicians now asking him to create for them.

“It’s awesome that kind of a thing can happen,” Rogers said. “Everyone has a story.”

Rogers’ company Bopat Guitars was built upon the concept that custom guitars tell a story, specifically, the story of the customer. The designs and type of wood add texture and color to the story. For a veteran in recovery, Rogers picked a particular type of maple wood.

“A tree that’s basically rotting and they cut it down before it’s completely rotted,” he said. “Then, we bring it back to life by building guitars out of it. That very much resonated with that veteran.”

Before he was creating with customers’ stories in mind, Rogers made his own guitar during a monumental time in his life.

“I started building that and called it ‘Restoration’ because we were going through the loss of our grandson to suicide during COVID.”

Rogers’ grandson Michael passed away at 13 years old. Exactly eight months before his passing, another similarly aged boy in the same community was killed, and his name was Gannon Stauch. Rogers called Gannon his second grandson in heaven.

“Every guitar that we do, we honor our two lost grandsons,” he explained.

On every Bopat guitar, there’s a tribute to Gannon and Michael branded into the company logo.

Michael is represented with a semicolon before the letter B and Gannon is honored with the underlined G on the word guitar.

“I think it’s just a great way to honor two young men gone too soon, way too soon,” Rogers said. “There’s a sense of finality and there’s also a sense of hope when I look at that.”