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A costly distraction: Close to death

Story by Bradley W. Parks, photos and video by Shane Flanigan

This is part one of the Costly Distraction series. Read part two: Rebuilding a life and part three: Taking control.

Stephanie Latier never expected to learn to walk again at age 32.

Nor did she anticipate eating or drinking to be so difficult. Swallowing challenged her to the point she had to put reminders in her phone telling her not to starve herself.

Her life was not like this in early February. And knowing it was preventable haunts her.

Despite her struggle, Stephanie embraces life in the physical world with much more joy these days. She used to push it away, digging deeper and deeper into a digital world where she could control her narrative.

By doing so, Stephanie's grip on life in the physical world loosened to the point it almost slipped away.

Stephanie Latier stands next to the remains of her Chrysler minivan at her parents’ campground and talks about the crash that nearly took her life. On Feb. 18, she was driving to work on Ohio 37 near Millersport when she drifted left of center. Her front passenger side collided head-on with another vehicle. She suffered shearing of her spine and a fracture in her leg. Her brain injury was categorized as a diffuse axonal injury, which occurs when the brain shifts forward and backward in the skull. Shaken baby syndrome falls in the same category. To view more photos, visit www.zanesvilletimesrecorder.com.

Stephanie sat quietly, dressed in black yoga pants and a black T-shirt. She pointed her gaze downward, focusing on the pale pink floors in the waiting room at the Genesis Center for Occupational and Outpatient Rehabilitation.

It was a Tuesday. On Monday, she had walked for 30 minutes with her two daughters, Emma and Lily Latier.

"My mom followed us in the golf cart. I didn't have to get in once," she said proudly.

A half-hour walk around her parents' campground was an arduous task for Stephanie in late May, especially the day before therapy. Her therapists liked to push her limits, so she usually left with sore muscles.

This time, physical therapist Tara Kuzma started her on monster walks, an exercise to improve hip stability.

Stephanie swung her right leg forward, then swept it out wide as if her knees could not bend. Her white Nike sneaker clapped down on the linoleum tile.

Kuzma spotted Stephanie by holding her sides as she mirrored this motion with her left leg. She did this all the way down the hall. Then Kuzma told her to do it in reverse.

Swooping her legs out and back, each movement Stephanie made was slow and calculated.

Stephanie Latier spent nearly five weeks in inpatient rehabilitation at Ohio State University’s Dodd Hall in Columbus before moving out April 17 and beginning outpatient rehabilitation at Genesis COOR in Zanesville. “Every time I would think ‘This is too hard,’ I would imagine if my daughters were sitting there watching me,” she said. “Would they want to see me fail? Would they want to see me struggle? They gave me a little more momentum every day.”

"It's my brain signaling to my legs to move," she said.

She was practicing movements people make without thinking about them. Stephanie knew in her head how to walk and sit and shuffle and kick. Her body just had trouble remembering the motions.

Though in late April, walking at all would have been a challenge. Before that, even standing was an obstacle.

"It's silly because those kind of things are difficult to me, but I feel stronger," Stephanie said. "I feel like every movement I make is progress toward healing, toward recovery."

Becoming a statistic

Stephanie wriggled in the front seat of her minivan, her bulky winter coat making it difficult to get comfortable.

Wednesday, Feb. 18 was cold. Temperatures never broke 20 degrees. Snow continued to fall lightly as it had since around 2 a.m., when Stephanie and her two daughters were fast asleep, rippling their pillowcases with sleepy breath.

Pickerington, where Stephanie lived at the time, had received multiple dustings of snow that week, which, combined with the frigid temperatures, made the roads treacherous.

Lily, her 8-year-old, begged her mother not to go to work that day. The girls' school district already put them on a two-hour delay by the time Stephanie was ready to leave, which made her late. She was hurrying to make it to work at Fairfield Academy in Thornville. Stephanie dropped Lily and Emma off with a neighbor and hugged them goodbye before she left.

Stephanie fished her iPhone out of the empty passenger seat next to her to post a photo warning her Facebook friends about the icy streets.

She sent text messages to a long list of friends, wishing them well, telling them to be safe and asking how they were.

Stephanie squirmed a bit more in the warm restraint of her coat as the van's heat started to affect her. She left her seat belt off to feel a bit more freedom.

Minutes passed before she arrived at a stop. She took a selfie, eyebrows raised, head slightly tilted toward the camera, seat belt buckle dangling behind her left shoulder.

Frost coated the back windows, clouding everything in her rear view.

She took a video of herself, unabashedly belting No Doubt's "Spiderwebs" alone in her minivan.

Stephanie continued driving and continued peeking at her phone. As her attention drifted, so did her van.

It slid over the center line on Ohio 37 near Blacklick Road. Another vehicle slammed into Stephanie's passenger side, hurling her from the driver's seat.

Tim Latier, the girls' father, called Emma.

"He never really calls me, he just texts me," the 12-year-old said. "And I was kinda worried because he was shivering. He didn't know what to do."

Emma passed the phone to her neighbor, who tried to reassure the girls that things were fine.

"I said, 'Something must have happened to Mom,'" Emma said.

Nearly 18,000 distracted driving crashes happened in Ohio in 2014, according to the Ohio Department of Public Safety. More than 3,000 of those resulted in injuries, 14 in fatalities.

On Feb. 18, Stephanie's crash became one of more than 9,000 distracted driving crashes reported in the state so far this year.

Behind her lonely number were her two daughters, her parents and a horde of friends who would each help Stephanie try to put her life back together.

Stephanie Latier poses for a photo with her two daughters, Lily, left, and Emma, in October 2012.

A flight out

Stephanie's parents, Pam and Rick Tilley, were on vacation, escaping the cold. They were in Groveland, Florida, to visit their friends, Glen and Sandie Paluso.

The Tilleys had been in town for two and a half weeks on a regular month-long trip. They own and operate Wolfies Campground off Buckeye Drive in Zanesville. The winter months are their chance to explore while snow and cold slow their business.

The Tilleys were a short drive from their friends' house when their daughter Stephanie's ex-husband, Tim, called in a panic. His voice trembled so much he could hardly speak, but he began explaining what he could.

That morning around 10:22, Stephanie's van went left of center and her tires lost grip on the snow-covered road. As she slid, her front passenger side hit the other vehicle's driver side. Because she was not wearing her seat belt, the impact threw her to the passenger side, into a crunching wad of glass and metal.

EMS workers found Stephanie with her back against the passenger door and her head through the passenger window. Crews cut the passenger door off the van to safely remove Stephanie from the vehicle.

The other driver was taken to the hospital with minor injuries.

After the crash, Stephanie was taken to nearby Fairfield Medical Center in Lancaster. The weather conditions were too poor to airlift her to Columbus, so she was taken to Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center's intensive care unit by a MedFlight ambulance.

As soon as Pam hung up the phone, Rick began driving them back to their camper, where she hurriedly packed a bag of belongings and scarfed a quick bite to eat.

In the moment, Pam couldn't think about the devastating news she just received. She tried to work all thoughts and feelings to the recesses of her mind, so she could act with a clear head.

"You kick in a mode of where your emotions don't take over you, where you do what you know you have to do," Pam said.

After Pam had gathered a few things, Rick began driving her to the Orlando airport. As he drove, the Palusos hunted for the next flight to Columbus on the Internet.

"If I would've stopped just for a few minutes and thought about what was going on, really thought about it, I don't think I could've made the flight," Pam said.

She was in the air by 2 p.m.

The kindness of strangers

As the wheels left the ground on Pam's unexpected afternoon flight, her mind began to wander. She was forced to stew on the crash, thinking over everything she did not yet know.

The couple sitting next to Pam on the plane could sense her discomfort. She told them what was happening: Her daughter Stephanie had been in a crash and she did not know if she would live.

Pam tried to distract herself by asking the strangers what they did, where they were from, why they were in Florida, why they were going to Columbus, anything to avoid thinking about the unthinkable that had just occurred and that she did not yet understand.

The two strangers were on vacation, like the Tilleys. They owned a travel agency in North Columbus.

Pam traded business cards with the woman and the couple offered to drive her to the hospital when they landed. Pam had planned to find a rental car, but gladly accepted their offer to maintain the distraction. In the backseat of their car, Pam continued talking to avoid confronting the pain.

"Just hearing them talk about their vacation stuff helped a lot," Pam said. "And they knew it was."

Pam offered the couple $20 for the ride, but they refused. She discreetly left a $20 bill on the backseat of the car as she got out.

As Pam walked away, the couple began to holler and waved her back to the car. She had forgotten her bag. Pam retrieved it, thanked the couple for the ride and began walking toward the door again, where her brother Mark McCutcheon was waiting.

An emotional drive

Rick was prepared to board the next flight to Columbus if he had to. As soon as he and his wife heard the news, his primary focus was getting Pam in the air as soon as possible.

After he did that, he was ready to get home. If he had to fly, he would. The camper could stay. They would get it later.

Pam landed in Columbus at 5:30 p.m. and by that time, doctors had stabilized Stephanie. She suffered shearing of her spine and a fracture in her leg. Her brain injury was categorized as a diffuse axonal injury, which occurs when the brain shifts forward and backward in the skull. Shaken baby syndrome falls in the same category.

When Pam called Rick to tell him his daughter was stable, he then opted to begin the solo drive from Groveland to Columbus with more than 14 hours to ponder everything he didn't know about his daughter's condition.

Stephanie Latier stands with her father, Rick Tilley, at the Tilleys’ campground in Zanesville. She moved back into her parents’ home after the crash. “I was so thankful for my parents. That they were able to help me out in a time like this,” she said. “But I had a job. I had two cars. I had a house. It was all gone.”

Stephanie had developed a reputation as an overactive phone user. She almost always had it in her hand, preoccupied with whatever was happening in the digital world.

Rick knew this, but his daughter was old enough that she could not always be told what to do anymore. Rick understood Stephanie was independent and strong-willed, unwilling to give an inch on just about anything, her phone included.

Rick thought about all the times his daughter called and he'd say, "You're not driving are you?" She would tell him it was OK, that she was in control, that the pocket-sized slab of metal and glass in her hand was something she possessed, not the other way around.

As cities, counties and states passed, Rick thought about what might have gone wrong. His emotions hit in slow waves. Rick transitioned from despair to anger and back again.

"I was so mad at her," he said. "Because when I found out she didn't have her seat belt on, that she had put videos on the Internet of the shape of the roads or a song she was listening to and singing, it's just the first reaction is being mad."

With so many unknowns, Rick felt out of control. Much as he tried to predict his daughter would be OK, he had no idea. Neither did anyone else.

Thoughts rushed by as quickly as the lane lines out his car window. Rick's vision for the future started to blur like the image in his rear view, pulled out of focus with the flaring of burning headlights.

Coming to grips

Nothing could have prepared Pam for what she saw when she entered her daughter's hospital room, but her brother Mark tried anyway.

Pam and Mark had lost their brother, Kenny McCutcheon, in a crash in 1994. Hearing her daughter Stephanie nearly died the same way was a feeling Pam never wanted to encounter.

Stephanie lay in her hospital bed motionless. The crash knocked her into a coma. When she began regaining consciousness, she was able to recognize her name and lift her thumb. She could move her first two fingers on her right hand by command. However, she could not move her toes, which led to concerns of paralysis.

Emergency personnel found Stephanie Latier unconscious with her back against the passenger door and her head through the window. She was not wearing her seat belt. She was taken to Fairfield Medical Center in Lancaster and then transferred to Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s intensive care unit in Columbus.

Doctors sedated her to prevent her from moving, waking her up periodically to check for progress. The stillness allowed Stephanie's injuries to begin gradually healing on their own.

Stephanie's neck was supported by a brace and she was connected to a complex road map of tubes. Though in so many ways she looked lifeless, hooked up to beeping machines, the tubes gave her life.

When Pam asked the medical staff for updates, they could not offer much clarity.

"You're begging the doctors to tell you something positive and you're just not hearing nothing positive," Pam said. "It's like a 50-50 that she'll even wake up and then the odds just change from there. I was begging them to tell me something more than that."

She settled in Stephanie's room and found a $20 bill stuffed in the side pocket of her bag.

When Rick finally finished the drive up Interstate 75 back to Ohio, he stopped in Columbus to see his daughter before returning home to Zanesville.

He had expected something different.

The entire drive home, while his mind occasionally wandered to the worst possible outcome, he remained optimistic that Stephanie would be better than what he eventually saw.

"When I walked in, I thought she'd be sitting up," Rick said, "that she wasn't hurt that bad."

He was wrong.

All the control the Tilleys exercised over their minds in the immediate aftermath of the crash slipped away slowly. The urgent need to act was gone as were the distractions that came with it.

They needed more information, but when they realized it would only come with time they started to relax their grip. They had to let go and let time do its work.

bparks2@gannett.com

740-868-3732

Twitter: @Bradley_W_Parks

About the series

Stephanie Latier suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident in February, which she attributes to distracted driving. Her attempt to regain the life she nearly lost illustrates the delicate challenges of living with TBI, and the potential consequences of distracted driving.

The three-day series continues Sunday, when we learn how rehab took Stephanie from a coma to home.

Distracted driving data

•Ohio law banned texting while driving in August 2012.

•Nearly 18,000 distracted driving accidents occurred in Ohio last year.

•The number of distracted driving accidents in Ohio increased by more than 300 from 2013 to 2014.

•In 2014, more than 3,000 distracted driving accidents in Ohio resulted in injuries, 14 in fatalities.

Source: Ohio Department of Public Safety