By Matt James, The Fresno Bee, Calif.
Mar. 12–Other Stories * The other victims Which local sports are you most interested in right now? Is it the Bulldogs and WAC women’s basketball, Bulldogs baseball or softball, prep basketball regionals, Fresno Falcons and ECHL playoffs, or something else? Kathleen Freeman said: Were are the local baseball reports online for March 9, 10, and 11? [Join the talk!] MERCED — From the chaos, the broken bones, the frantic teenagers and the burning cars, a police officer saved Gerald Hayden. The officer left town long ago, but he still remembers the 15-year-old boy saying his back was broken, and he remembers the screams when he picked him up. For the next month, Gerald thought about sports a lot while he was in the hospital, as his body shriveled from 137 pounds to 112, as doctors tried to save his organs and get him healthy enough for back surgery. He wondered whether he would ever play water polo or tennis again, or whether he would ever run. No one knew. Gerald Hayden is 25 now. He has been paralyzed from the waist down for more than a decade, since the crash that left two boys paralyzed and a homecoming queen dead. He is in Italy, where today he will ski the downhill at the 2006 Turin Winter Paralympics. In the coming week, he will compete in four alpine skiing events — downhill, super-G, slalom and giant slalom — in Sestriere, the same location where Bode Miller skied the same events last month in the able-skier Games, though as Gerald says, “You probably won’t see us on NBC.” And like Miller, Gerald probably won’t win a medal. He hasn’t even been competing for two years. Some of the Paralympic skiers have been doing it for two decades. They fly from continent to continent on a World Cup circuit. They have sponsors and Web sites. They are randomly drug-tested. Gerald has raced just one international event, the World Cup Finals two weeks ago in Artesina, Italy, where in his first race, the slalom, he bounced out of a rut, wiped out and went sliding down the course on his side. Laughing, he says, “Not a great way to start my World Cup career.” ———— The last day Gerald Hayden walked started out so well. Like most Paralympians, he has a story. It is a sad one, like most of their how-did-you-get-here stories, which is why they don’t like to tell them. No point complaining about turbulence to the guy sitting next to you on a plane. The day was Sept. 22, 1995, a football Friday for Golden Valley High, the new school on the south side of Merced. The city had outgrown Merced High and so the previous year, three classes — freshmen, sophomores and juniors — became the first to attend Golden Valley. Without seniors, they didn’t have many athletic victories that first year. The second year, though, the Cougars’ football team started 2-0. Mayor Richard Bernasconi announced a “Mayor’s Cup” that would be kept by the winner of the cross-town football game. Golden Valley beat Merced that Friday night, 53-14, and there was a dance afterward. Word spread of a bonfire party south of town. No one wanted the night to end. Two of Gerald’s friends were catching a ride with a junior, which sounded a lot cooler to Gerald than having his mom pick him up after a dance. In all, four sophomore boys, all 15, all too young for driver’s licenses, got into a Honda Passport with 16-year-old Matthew Hunwardsen. Brian Lee took the passenger seat. Kristopher Wyman sat in the back left. Jonathan Meuser jumped in next to him. Gerald sat on the right. They drove down Childs Avenue, over Highway 99, past the fields of junk cars, Barger Veterinary Clinic and RBJ Transport. They drove by the Merced Flea Market, turned left onto Highway 59 and drove out of the south end of Merced toward El Nido, a little cluster of houses that breaks up the alfalfa fields. Gerald just wanted to go home. It was late. He was sitting in the back, dozing off, his head resting against the window. He and Jonathan had played in a junior varsity water polo match that day. They were supposed to play another the next day. It was nearly midnight by then, and they still hadn’t found the bonfire everyone had been talking about. They turned around and drove back toward Merced. About that time, three girls were leaving for the bonfire, heading south down Highway 59 in Tina Church’s Toyota. Tina was driving. Joy Akers sat in the passenger’s seat. Shaunna Soares was in the back. They were seniors, all on the softball team, and Joy played volleyball. They had been best friends for years, grown up in each other’s houses, spent so much time together it was all but impossible for their parents not to think of the other two as daughters, too. ———— Jeff Catchings had arrested a woman that night. He was a Merced police officer, part of the gang violence suppression unit. He was just 27. Since the day he became a cop, he had dreamed of being a special agent, of throwing himself into drawn-out, complicated investigations, of going undercover, busting bad guys in a big city. The woman he arrested was the mother of a gang member, for whom she had thrown a party that night. There were warrants out for her, and Catchings wanted to make a point that parents should be responsible for their kids’ bad behavior, not encouraging it, and so he cuffed her, put her in the front seat and drove south down Highway 59 toward the county jail. The John Latorraca Correctional Center was a couple of miles west of 59, a right turn on Sandy Mush Road halfway to El Nido. In daylight, you could see the radio tower first, driving past fence-lined pastures with windmills and mud holes and water troughs where the cows liked to gather. In front of the jail was a chain-link fence with a green covering that made the place look like the most carefully guarded batting cage in the world. But Catchings and the woman hadn’t quite gotten to Sandy Mush when they saw the car wreck that Merced residents would read about, that would haunt the families of those eight teenagers for years.
———— Matthew Hunwardsen had tried to pass two vehicles at once. The second was a tomato truck. But the headlights of an oncoming car, Tina Church’s car, were too close, too big, and he swerved. Tina swerved, too. The two cars slammed into each other on the shoulder of the highway, where the green grass blades still poke through the gravel. “In 16 years,” Catchings said, “it was the worst head-on I’ve seen. It’s amazing any of them lived.” Smoke poured out from under the hood of the girls’ car as he ran to it. Students in other cars had gotten out and were yelling. They’re trapped inside. Catchings smashed a window, cut Joy Akers’ seat belt and pulled her out. Then he and two high school boys got Shaunna Soares out. There was nothing he could do for Tina Church. The SUV had spun against her door, and she was pinned in. There was never an explosion, but the fire moved fast, burned the tires and swallowed the front seat. Another officer and an off-duty firefighter arrived, and they helped pull the five boys from the SUV as the fire grew hotter. They placed the two girls and the five boys on the ground side by side, one after another, bleeding and burned and some unconscious. Two boys in the back wearing seat belts were the only ones conscious. The impact had folded their bodies forward at the waist. By then, nearly 20 Golden Valley students had stopped on their way to or from the bonfire. They watched the cars burn with their school’s first homecoming queen, Tina Church, still inside. “I want to say she died on impact,” Catchings says, “but there’s no way to know.” At the scene, officers had thought Matthew Hunwardsen was drunk because he was stammering around mumbling nonsense. But it turned out to be a head injury. When it was finally finished and the ambulances had driven away, Catchings walked back to his unmarked squad car. The doors were unlocked. The woman in handcuffs hadn’t moved. In the 10 1/2 years since that Friday night, Catchings did become a special agent, moved to Los Angeles, hated Los Angeles, and is now an agent with the Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement in Sacramento. He doesn’t go undercover because he looks too much like a cop. He still thinks about the boys sometimes, even though he doesn’t remember their names. Neither Gerald nor Kristopher Wyman would walk again. My back is broken, Gerald told him that night. “It’s something I hope he doesn’t regret,” the officer says. “If we didn’t take him, he was going to burn.” ———— They don’t hold Paralympic skiing events on the bunny slopes. At the World Cup Finals two weeks ago in Artesina, Italy, another skier shot off course, went over a ledge and fell into a ravine. The downhill was so fast, a Japanese racer fractured a vertebra and an Australian dislocated a hip before they canceled it, with Gerald at the top of the mountain waiting his turn. His ascent has been a quick one. He didn’t start training seriously until the fall of 2004, after moving to Winter Park, Colo., where he still lives, but was ranked in the top 50 in the world by the end of the season. A year later, he was in the top 35 in every event, and still needed three podium finishes at the Meridian Cup a month ago in Winter Park to make the Turin team. The coaches selected 20 male skiers. Gerald was No. 18. The next week, he took fourth in the slalom at the U.S. Nationals, qualified for the World Cup Finals and was on a plane out of Fresno, bound for San Francisco, Chicago and, finally, Munich, Germany. His grandmother had given Gerald’s parents $1,000 to travel to Turin, but they slipped it to him to pay for the World Cup trip. He doesn’t have any sponsors and doesn’t get funding from the U.S. national team because, well, he’s not on the U.S. national team yet. “I’ve exceeded my expectations,” he said last week. “I just want to ski as well as I can. If all I do is come in 20th, I’ll be satisfied with that. That’ll still mean I’m 20th in the world. “Two years ago, I’d have never guessed I’d be in Sestriere today.” ———— After the surgery, the doctor took a deep breath and released it slowly. Gerald’s father was not supposed to see this, but he did, and so before the doctor walked into the waiting room, led them to a conference room and told them the news, Stuart Hayden knew his son would not walk again. The 15-year-old boy had gone into the back surgery with hope and woke up to such despair. They could not repair the damage. He would be able to move certain leg muscles, but not enough to walk or stand without crutches. Gerald was so angry. At anyone. No one. Everyone. He wallowed in everything he would never be able to do. For years, his parents tried not to help him too much, tried not to pity him. He didn’t want their help anyway. He was in the hospital for so long he grew 3 inches before they let him go home. He needed a rotating bed to keep from getting bed sores. Hard to believe his greatest sports achievement was yet to come. ———— Skiing had been a part of Gerald’s life since he was 11, until he switched to snowboarding, like the rest of his friends. Before long, he strapped on his snowboard and climbed onto the trampoline in the backyard because he wanted to try a flip. His mom is the only one who flipped that day. After he was paralyzed, after the back brace finally came off, he tried monoskiing. It felt like he was attached to a toboggan. He fell, a lot. The monoski looked like a bucket bolted to an extra-wide ski, and when he fell, the ski wedged up in the air, meaning he and the seat did the stopping, scraping along the snow. It hurt, but mostly it was exciting. He tried it first in 1996, on a trip he and his parents took to the Tahoe Adaptive Ski School. He had to learn to roll his hips instead of his ankles, and finally his muscles learned, and the skill suddenly clicked, the way it did when he learned to ski, or snowboard. After five years at the University of California at Davis getting an economics degree, he went to a racing camp and decided to move to Colorado and give racing a try. ———— After the crash, the city ached. The teenagers’ families suffered. Even now, they are still recovering from what happened, when lives careened in new directions, when fates were decided by who had called shotgun and who had to ride in the middle. When a girl died. They’ve all asked “Why?” so many times the past decade it seems pointless now. Why does a boy in the middle of the back seat, not wearing a seat belt, sustain injuries he can recover from, and the two boys sitting next to him, wearing seat belts, never get to walk again? Why do so many good kids have to suffer? Why did Tina Church have to die? Gerald Hayden stopped asking for the most part. He was so mad for so long. “The hardest adjustment is becoming comfortable in your own skin,” he says. “The self-perception has to change. You’re not an abled person who has been hurt. You’re just a person who uses a wheelchair.” This week, Gerald Hayden will ski on a mountain in Italy. He will wear the same jackets, the same shoes, the same gloves and scarves as the Olympians. He will race on the same mountain, eat the same free food in the village. He attended the Opening Ceremony in Turin on Friday and there will be a closing one next Sunday. “We go to a coffee shop and they’re excited to have us there,” he said. “We’re celebrities, but they don’t know who we are.” And in his case, it won’t really matter whether he wins a medal. “I’m so happy for him,” says Louisa Soares, Shaunna’s mother. “People are dealt different situations in life,” Jonathan Meuser says. “He just took what life gave him and made the best of it.” The Paralympian thinks back to his life before the wreck. It seems so long ago. “We’re out there ripping it up on the slopes,” he says. “You know, sometimes we get mad at these able-bodied skiers because they get in our way. We’re better at it than they are. That feels good.” The reporter can be reached at [email protected] or (559) 441-6217. Read his blogat www.fresnobeehive.com.
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