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  Station 2 was accustomed to innumerable bogus calls too. Some residents reported kids having been hit by cars, and responders arrived only to find the callers just wanted a ride to the emergency room for a twisted finger and thought flowering up their call would expedite the ambulance. Others made prank calls out of boredom and a warped sense of humor. But those fools were seldom up this early in the morning, which made the first call of the day all the more grave:

  CHILD STRUCK BY TRAIN.

  SEND MED UNIT TO ELINOR STREET.

  “There are calls you dawdle on. There are calls you think, ‘I seriously doubt it.’ And then there are the ones no one says anything. You just get in the truck and go,” Keith said. “This was one of those.” Dispatch routinely ordered the med unit out first, and then if a call required help, responders summoned the engine for additional manpower. Lt. Doug Bjerre, a twenty-five-year veteran on the force, knew that if this call were real, the med unit would not be able to handle it alone. He immediately ordered the engine to go along.

  Dispatch crossed again.

  CHILD STRUCK BY TRAIN.

  THIS IS NOT A JOKE.

  Paramedic Michelle Dockstader drove the ambulance that morning, only one of a handful of times she remembered taking the turns so aggressively. “Emergencies are relative. Getting somewhere three seconds faster doesn’t usually make a difference,” she said. “But on that day, there was the unspoken sense that three seconds might matter.”

  Michelle squeezed the wheel, pressing the gas pedal to the floor with all of her weight. She wondered why dispatch would say it’s not a joke. They never talked like that. How would they have confirmed it? Still, even if the call was not a hoax, there was no way this child could be alive. This would surely be a recovery run. They would declare the child dead on-site and wait for the coroner. She turned down Elinor, a short residential street that dead-ended into a cluster of industrial buildings and an exposed train track. As Michelle, Richard, and EMT rookie Danielle Michele pulled onto the gravel with the fire engine right behind, they didn’t see anything unusual. There was no sign or sound of a train. “Then once we pulled closer, we looked down and saw a body,” Richard remembered. Michelle sprinted toward the tracks, forgetting her bag and her monitor. “I don’t know what the Angel of Mercy was going to do with my bare hands, but I started running,” she remembered. She came to a halt when the body next to the track ever so slightly lifted his head.

  “Oh my God!” Michelle gasped. “He’s alive.”

  “This is my brother, Leroy,” Tony cried as he ran toward them. “You gotta help him!” As he and Leroy had walked along their respective sides of the train, Tony looked under each passing car to make sure he could see the glow of Leroy’s new white shoes against the gravel. But after the first few cars, they suddenly disappeared. Tony took off running toward the end of the train, but there was seemingly no end to the lumbering cars. When he finally rounded to Leroy’s side of the track, his brother lay still on the ground, the train clanking away. Leroy’s jeans were ripped in a hundred places, with blood seeping through the slits. Or was that raw flesh? Tony started to vomit in his mouth. “What happened to you?” he screamed.

  “I just got sucked under,” Leroy said. Both boys masked their panic. Leroy feared his brother being mad at him for ruining his new shoes, and Tony feared his mother coming after him with a baseball bat for getting Leroy killed.

  “Let’s get you off these tracks,” Tony said. He tried to pick Leroy up from under his arms. Leroy shrieked in pain, so Tony set him down just a few feet off the tracks. “I’m going for help. I’ll be right back.”

  Tony raced to a factory twenty feet across the tracks, where a man sat on the loading dock with his morning cigarette and coffee. “My brother just got hit by a train! You gotta help me!” Tony shouted.

  “Stop playin’, man,” the worker said, unfazed, as he took another drag and looked out into the trees.

  “Bro, can’t you see all this blood on me?” Tony shouted.

  The man turned to see Tony’s new silver pants splattered with crimson. “Woah, man, I’ll call an ambulance!” he said as he dove back into the dock.

  THE AMBULANCE ARRIVED after six of the longest minutes of Tony’s life. And now the members of the rescue crew stood over Leroy, somewhat unsure. They had never seen a trauma victim so collected. His blood loss was minimal, considering his injuries. He was not in pain, his body numbed into shock. And because he could not sit up, Leroy did not yet know to be afraid. He could not see his lower extremities. “We were all amazed to see how calm he was,” Keith said. “He was alert and oriented to person, place, and time.”

  Leroy stared up at the group, eyes glassy and white, wondering what would happen next. And they stared back, wondering the very same thing. Trauma responders are trained in the A-B-Cs: airway, breathing, circulation. Leroy needed no intervention in those regards. But he did need to be moved, quickly. As is typical in crush injuries, the train’s wheels had cauterized Leroy’s blood vessels, but they could just as easily open without warning and Leroy could bleed to death. There was no way to know how much time he had. There was also no way of knowing what parts of his legs were attached and what might fall off if they lifted him. “From the waist up, he was a coherent, whole child,” Keith said. “But the rest of him was a big jumble of parts and pieces rolled in leaves and dirt, with a shoe dangling backward from what used to be an ankle.” His other foot sat fifteen yards down the track. Lifting Leroy posed a risk of further injuring his lower extremities.

  “Slide a sheet underneath him, to hold him all together,” Lt. Bjerre suggested, unconventionally. They shimmied a sheet under Leroy, scooped him onto a backboard, and ran. Once in the ambulance, Richard made first contact with the Akron Children’s Hospital:

  URGENT TRAFFIC. WE HAVE A TRAUMA.

  ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD MALE RUN OVER BY TRAIN.

  CRUSH INJURIES BELOW LEFT KNEE, ABOVE RIGHT KNEE.

  CONSCIOUS. AMPUTATED FOOT.

  WE NEED A TRAUMA TEAM.

  Senior firefighter Rick Staeger stayed behind to collect the strewn globs of Leroy’s tissue, bone fragments, and his foot. Lt. Bjerre drove the med unit while Keith, Michelle, Richard, and Danielle squeezed in the back with Leroy. There, reality set in. “I’ll be the first to say that I froze,” Michelle remembered. “I was sitting in the back of the rig where his feet should be. He was lying there talking to us, and that’s not supposed to happen to a child who gets run over by a train. I wanted to grab his legs and tell him everything was going to be okay. But there was nothing to grab.”

  Keith started an IV line of fluids and led Leroy through a list of basic questions to keep him alert. What is your name? What is your address? What is your date of birth? “I have a son named Steven who is your age,” Keith said. “In a few minutes, I am going to ask you again what his name is.” Leroy’s answers would assure them blood was reaching his brain. He calmly responded to each question, and as the ambulance pulled into the hospital, Leroy asked one of his own: “Will I be able to run track in the spring?”

  Michelle turned away, eyes stinging with salty tears. Danielle gulped down a breath. Richard’s lip quivered, and his pen slipped. And Keith thought of his own son, also a fifth-grader. He thought about what he would want someone to say if this was his boy hanging between life and death. He put one hand on Leroy’s head, the other across his chest. He said, “Son, as long as your heart and your mind are okay, you will be fine. Your heart and your mind can take you everywhere you want to go. Everything else you can live without.”

  A sea of doctors and nurses stood waiting for Leroy’s stretcher. As she watched his stretcher disappear, Michelle didn’t want to forget this run. “Lord, don’t let anything happen to this little boy,” she whispered. “Don’t let him end up a miserable, angry person in a wheelchair who hates the world. Don’t let him fall into the system he came from. Help him make something of himself. Show him love in this world.”

  LEROY ARRIVED
AT Akron Children’s Hospital less than thirty minutes removed from the accident, well within the Golden Hour trauma teams shoot for to maximize chances of survival. The hospital chaplain took Leroy’s hand as they wheeled him into an examining station, asking him where he went to school and what subjects he enjoyed. Dr. John Crow, pediatric surgeon, began unpacking Leroy from the sheet. Though this hospital is located in the heart of Akron, the most horrific injuries tend to come from neighboring Amish communities, where young children wielding aging farming machinery often suffer lost and mutilated limbs. Dr. Crow had yet to see a train accident survivor, though, and as he peeled open the sheet, he immediately knew Leroy fell into the top three traumas he had seen in his nine years of practice. Cinders coated his bloodied lower half, which was butchered into bright red marbled chunks like one would see in a meat market, yet still held loosely together by the ligaments. His jeans were twisted and ground into the wounds. “His injuries were so severe, so grotesque, so dramatic,” Dr. Crow recounted. “I will forever remember Leroy coming in as clear as any day I’ve ever had.”

  Dr. Crow called up to the operating room to let them know a Trauma III, the highest grade of life-threatening trauma, was on its way. Whether to amputate was never a decision; Leroy’s legs could not be saved. The question was whether his life could be spared. No one knew how long Leroy’s blood vessels would remain sealed. The team began cleaning out gravel and debriding tissue, harvesting any little bit they might use for future skin grafts, and removing flaps they feared could lead to infection. The skin below Leroy’s left knee was salvaged, but the flesh hanging from his right leg proved largely unusable. The more time that passed, the greater the risk of infection, or even worse, sepsis.

  That afternoon, Leroy awoke briefly in the intensive care unit with his mother, his grandmother, and his aunt waiting bedside. “I had a dream that I got run over by a train and my legs were gone,” Leroy said groggily as he tried to get up.

  His mother put her hand on his shoulder and gently pressed him back to the bed. “Baby, that wasn’t a dream,” she said. Leroy slowly pulled back the covers to find two mounds of bloodied gauze. He looked back at the faces in the room, all eyes puddling with tears. Turning his head away from his family, he noticed that the wallpaper border around the top of his room was a colorful strip of train engines and freight cars. He couldn’t look up. He couldn’t look down. He closed his eyes and went somewhere else.

  Leroy returned to surgery eight times over the next two weeks for repeated tissue cleaning, removing specks of cinder, milking pus, and irrigating his festering, malodorous wounds. The doctors also began stretching muscle tissue and grafting flaps of skin over the ends of his amputated bones. His stumps were wrapped in burn-victim gauze soaked with antibiotic solution, and drainage tubes were used to collect the fluids that oozed from his wounds. Although Leroy developed occasional abscesses and minor infections, surgeons grew increasingly optimistic that he would survive.

  While Leroy’s body tolerated each procedure well, torment seized his mind every night. “I could not go to sleep, because when I tried to go to sleep, I’d end up hearing the sound of a train and it woke me back up, over and over again,” Leroy said. “I just laid awake and asked why. Why?” Leroy had been an athletic child, always among the first picked for neighborhood basketball and football games. He dreamed of becoming an NBA star like Michael Jordan or the Yankee heir to Derek Jeter at shortstop. Now the only dream accessible to him was that of thirteen fifty-ton boxcars sawing through his shins. He could see no further than the long night ahead, the hours primed to torture and haunt him.

  The only break he got from the mental anxiety came when surges of excruciating physical pain shot through him without warning. Leroy screamed and howled, gripping the bed rails. Sometimes the pain originated from his open wounds, burning and itching against the gauze. His nurses taught him which button to push for additional doses of morphine, and it calmed his body enough that he could then quietly cry. His ears would pool with cold tears. He did not wipe them away; he hadn’t the energy, and the sensation of wet ears was a strangely relieving counter to the burn throughout the rest of his body.

  Other times the pain was “phantom,” radiating from legs and feet that were no longer there. The nerves that connected his lower body to his brain essentially log-jammed and sent urgent messages in the form of sharp, throbbing pain that something was awry. No cocktail of drugs could combat phantom limb pain.

  One night in mid-December, Leroy lay alone in a rare moment when all the different types of pains had eased, allowing him a clear space in which to think. He longed for death’s peace more than he wanted to endure the atrocity of his life, and so he reached for the morphine controls, resolved to overdose. He pumped the release button thirteen times, once for each freight car that had crushed his legs and now his spirit. He looked over at his grandmother, who was asleep in the chair, as she had been each night since the accident, and he whispered that he loved her. Then he closed his eyes, content to slip into death.

  LEROY DIDN’T SHARE any of that with Dartanyon. Nor did he share his devastation upon learning that the morphine dispenser was equipped with a limiter to prevent overdoses. Instead of skipping across clouds into the arms of God, as he expected, he learned that his stay in hell had been extended. Indefinitely.

  “So really, what happened to your legs?” Dartanyon asked again.

  “I was hit by a train,” Leroy answered simply but firmly, signaling that no further questions would be taken.

  The others stood silently. But Dartanyon laughed, heartily. “That’s hilarious!” he exclaimed. “I never heard anyone say that before!” Dartanyon couldn’t see the awkward twisting of the faces around him; social cues were not his strong suit. Nor could he see Leroy’s top lip start to smile as he bit the bottom one down, intrigued by this odd reaction to his misfortune. Leroy was familiar with clumsy expressions of sympathy. He knew the face of pity. But it had been a long time since he’d heard laughter.

  LEROY AND DARTANYON didn’t cross paths again until the first practice of the 2008–9 season. Though most of the other wrestlers knew Leroy from class, they were unsure how to grapple with him and too nervous to even try. Except Dartanyon, that is.

  “Let’s do this, Leroy,” he called out from the mat. He knew how it felt to be flawed and left out.

  Leroy hadn’t wrestled in over a year; he quickly grew winded. But what little he could put forth was enough to surprise Dartanyon. “He was a complete powerhouse,” Dartanyon said. “I never wrestled anyone as strong as him, being as strong as I am.”

  Over the coming weeks, it became clear that Leroy’s strength was undeniable, yet Robinson and Hons questioned his heart. He seemed leery of everything and everyone. When told to do laps in his wheelchair while the others ran, Leroy weaved through oncoming traffic to disrupt his teammates and coax a few laughs. When Robinson blew the whistle to begin a drill, Leroy would hang back for a minute before starting or purposely alter the exercise. “Leroy always did things on his terms,” Robinson said. “The message he was sending was ‘I’ll do this, but I won’t do it your way, because I don’t trust you.’”

  “None of us knew what Leroy was getting out of this, and any time he got close to opening up to us, he quickly shut back down,” Hons said. “Wrestling is a sport of attrition, so if you don’t have the goods, you’re going to quit. But he didn’t quit. He kept coming back. And we couldn’t cut a legless kid.”

  “Sutton, your problem is that you’re a turtle,” Robinson said one day, laughing, as Leroy lay pancaked under Dartanyon. “Once you’re on your back, you’re done. You can’t roll over!” The kids snickered. Leroy seethed. The way he saw it, the only place Robinson looked like he could roll was down a steep slope with a hard push, which is what Leroy felt like doing to him. Robinson had ballooned to three hundred pounds as that season began.

  “I am in shape,” he would say when the kids called him Coach Fatboy or Chocolate Thunda. “R
ound is a shape, so don’t y’all discriminate! I used to wrestle at 103, you know.”

  “Maybe we can give your legs to Leroy and get you back down closer to 103,” Dartanyon would shoot back. Leroy liked seeing the jabs hurled in the other direction.

  What Leroy didn’t know was that Robinson was close to boiling over too. That summer, Robinson had separated from his wife of four years. He plummeted into depression, bankruptcy, and weight gain. He tried to hide his irritability at practice, but his tone was still harsher than usual. And his demonstrations on the mat sometimes seemed personal. “Coach, you changed,” Shawn Bonilla said one day. “You ain’t the same person you were last year.” Robinson still walked the track each day, praying for the Lord to save his kids’ lives. But in the next breath, he asked God to take his own. He didn’t know how many more days he could go on living with his heart dragging around by his ankles.

  Their first match came in late November, a dual against John Marshall High School. Coach Hons thought they were as ready as they could be, but as the big yellow school bus pulled up to load the team, they realized they had neglected one significant element of preparation—how to physically get Leroy on the bus. Five steps connected the door of the gym to the sidewalk, the bus lacked a lift, and the ground was wet. Dartanyon needed just a few seconds to consider both the problem and the solution. “Hop on my back,” he said. “I’ll carry you.” Leroy did as he was told. He raised himself up in the chair, wrapped his arms around Dartanyon’s neck, and rode piggyback to the bus.

  “What are you two idiots doing?” Robinson asked as they boarded.

  “Just helping Leroy get on the bus,” Dartanyon answered. “There’s no ramp.” Dartanyon placed Leroy in a seat and then went back out to break down the wheelchair. When the bus arrived at their destination, Dartanyon carried Leroy off. When Robinson told the team to sit at the top of the bleachers so that they were always looking down on their opponents, Dartanyon put Leroy on his back and carried him up ten wooden rows. Dartanyon didn’t think to ask Leroy if he could manage on his own. And Leroy didn’t tell Dartanyon that he had been hauling himself onto buses and up and down stairs for the last six years.