The Horrible News
IF FOR SOME REASON YOU CAN’T READ
JARED’S STORY IN ITS ENTIRETY,
PLEASE GO TO MY NEWSLETTER BLOG AT
http://www.patsimmonsnewsletters.blogspot.com
Early last Saturday, on May 24th, at 5:30 a.m., I received “The call” that every parent dreads,
“This is Barnes Jewish Hospital, and we have your son, Jared, who was involved
in a terrible accident.”
My husband, daughter, and I prayed quietly en route to the emergency room.
Once in the parking garage, we couldn’t get out the car fast enough. After clearing the emergency room’s
metal detectors, the desk nurse advised us that only two visitors were allowed at a time.
Simi waited while Kerry and I journeyed through a maze to trauma room four.
There stretched on a gurney secured in a neck brace and twisted bloodied sheets,
laid our only son. His roaming eyes were glossy and his forehead bruised.
His tortured face recognized us. Whew, he was alive, I thanked God.
Considering I didn’t know where my son had been or whom he was with,
I began firing off questions and I didn’t care who answered.
Brooke, the emergency room nurse, said, “The only thing we know is he was in a terrible
rollover accident. He was found in the back seat.”
I scrutinized Jared, again. This time I noticed his admission wrist band, identifying
him as “John Doe.” I listened as Brooke recited details. “He came in about three.
He had trouble breathing. He kept mentioning Chris, but no one else was found in the vehicle.”
My heart raced as I asked, “Jared, were you driving?”
Shaking his head that was still restrained by the neck brace, he answered, no.
I mentally created scenarios. Since he was in the backseat, there had to be
two other occupants—the driver and the front passenger—I reasoned.
It wasn’t unheard of for people to crash a vehicle and somehow have enough strength
to flee the scene of the accident while an innocent person is injured.
“Can I see the police report,” I asked Brooke.
No such luck. She didn’t even see one. Okay, it was time to put my networking skills
to work. Six-thirty in the morning, I started waking up people. While my husband phoned family,
I called my good friend, AJ, first. Once I informed her that I was in the trauma unit, she was fully awake.
Because everything was sketchy, I asked if she could drive by
Jared’s dorm to see if his car was there—it was. He wasn’t driving—I thought.
My next call was to the police command post. As a member of the media, I routinely talk
to officers to extract information they don’t want to release.
Unfortunately, the command post handles reports associated with fatalities.
Still, I snooped for any tidbits about the non-fatal accident. Without a location, he couldn’t help me.
I called my colleague at the television station. As assignment editors, we monitor more than 15 police
and fire scanners around the metro area. “Brad, did you hear anything about a roll over accident overnight?”
“Let me check my notes,” he said, pausing. “Car crash happened at 2:45 at Broadway and E. Taylor.
Person ejected, car exploded, and re-construction called.”
Thanking him, I hung up still not sure if this was the same accident. After all, Jared was alive.
Re-construction is NEVER called unless someone is dead, or death is eminent.
I called command post back with the information. Finally, Officer Brown, who handled the scene,
called me. What he told me had me thirty seconds away from speaking in tongues, thanking Jesus
for sparing two lives. Oh yeah, it was another life besides Jared, but I’ll get to that later.
“Mrs. Simmons,” Officer Brown began. “I don’t know if you’re a religious person or not,
but it was nothing but God who protected them. When I got on the scene, paramedics were
working on your son. He was ejected from the vehicle and torpedoed 50 feet in the air
before landing between two steel pillars without touching them. I knew he was dead.
The only other young man had to be cut from the vehicle that split in two upon impact,
spewing the motor yards away and landing near a highway. I knew he wouldn’t live with multiple
fractures.” From the force of the impact, Jared and his friend were shot out of their shoes.
Officer Brown mentioned that the SUV was travelling at a high rate of speed before
slamming into a concrete-based street light. After a day in the hospital, we clarified that the person
ejected from the SUV was not my son, but his friend, Chris, who was rushed to another
hospital in critical condition. Until word of the crash spread, Chris’ family and mine weren’t able to verify,
that indeed, our sons were together.
After four days in the hospital, Jared was released. He had suffered fractured ribs,
a bruise to his bowel, laceration to his kidney, a concussion, and a fractured foot.
He will need months of recovery and physical therapy. Chris, on the other hand,
remains hospitalized. He has a much longer recovery ahead. Both don’t remember anything from that night.
**Footnote: A few months ago when my heart was heavy about the direction my son’s life was going,
God gave me Matthew 18:12-14:
12How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray,
doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that
which is gone astray? !3And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you,
he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray.
14Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven,
that one of these little ones should perish.
I later found out that the other young man, Chris, like Jared, had been baptized
in the name of Jesus and at one time, had also received the Holy Ghost.
What are the odds that two lost sheep would be together on the road to a sure death
(according to Officer Brown, in his 18 years of working a crash scene of that magnitude
NO ONE has lived, BUT God reached out as the Shepherd and said, “I got’em.”
As soon as Jared can get into a wheelchair, he plans to testify about what God did for him.
