Chapter 2

“Where Are We?”

Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.

JOSHUA 1:9

God, I’ll admit I have no idea where You are leading my life & honestly when I think about it, I become really excited, but at the same time scared!

Jen’s journal, two months before the crash

I heard my cell phone chirping away, but I was powerless to reach it. I wondered if one of the friends we’d invited to our house was trying to call.

In fact, our friends Paula and Robb Egel had driven by our accident just minutes after it happened. As they passed, Paula noticed a pile of crushed silver metal in the brush about twenty-five yards off the road. Immediately, she got a sick feeling in her stomach.

“Robb, what if that was Andy and Linda?” she wondered aloud. “They have a silver van.”

“Oh, Paula, don’t worry,” Robb assured her. “I’m sure they’re home by now, and besides, that mess didn’t look anything like a van.”

The two of them had continued to survey the scene as the police waved them slowly through the one open lane. Paula then called my cell phone, and I listened helplessly as it rang. Next Robb called my husband’s brother, John, asking if he’d heard from Andy.

“I got tired of waiting and I needed to get the kids home, so we left before Andy arrived,” John told them. Robb briefly described the accident scene on Waterlick Road.

“I talked to Andy about thirty minutes ago,” John replied. “He was just leaving KFC and said he was only minutes away. I haven’t heard from him since then. Maybe he had car trouble . . .” The words trailed off. The mass of metal in the wreck had been silver, like our minivan, and neither Andy nor I had answered our phones. Deep down, Robb and John were beginning to wonder if the worst could actually have happened.

“Where’d you see this?” John asked. His tone alarmed his wife, Gina, and the kids. They watched wide-eyed from across the room, waiting for some sign of what was going on.

“About a mile from Andy’s on Waterlick, where the road curves past that big brown building.”

“Go check it out again and call me right back,” pleaded John.

Neighbors for half a mile in every direction had heard the crash as the drunk driver drilled us head-on going eighty miles per hour. His pickup truck hit with such force that its V-8 engine was ripped out and dropped in the middle of the road as he literally ran over the top of us. Our van became a launching pad for the truck as it flew into the air and landed upside down. Carl, who wasn’t wearing a seat belt, was thrown clear of the wreckage into a ditch somewhere behind us. According to the time stamp on the 911 transcript marking when the accident was called in, it was thirty-three seconds past 8:25 p.m. on Sunday, November 5, 2006.

After the collision, Josh woke up first. Momentarily disoriented, he shook bits of glass and metal out of his hair and looked around. His first impression was of fried chicken and baked beans all over the place, even inside his shoe. There was a horrible smell of gasoline, chicken, burnt rubber, and blood all mixed together. To his left in the backseat was his sister, still unconscious. Her body was completely motionless, so he couldn’t tell whether she was alive or dead. Then he saw me, still strapped into the seat in front of him. My whole left side was covered with blood. He yelled for me, but I was still unconscious. He looked over at Andy, bleeding and unconscious in the driver’s seat, and thought at first the steering wheel had cut him in two.

Josh didn’t know what to think. He screamed for help, but no one came. Was his whole family dead? Despite the destruction all around him, he remained remarkably calm. An unexplainable peace came over him, and he could sense that God was with him and he was not alone. He started to recall the events of the day, which had begun with such promise. His team had won their championship game! Now Josh remembered how he had helped carry the team to victory. He made it to third base his last at bat, and his dad was so proud of him.

He was jerked back to the present when he saw me start to stir in response to my ringing cell phone. As the rescue team began working all around us, Josh and I prayed out loud. Drifting in and out of consciousness, the last thing I could remember was seeing Jennifer leaning against her van door dialing Kelsey’s number. She was the only one still unconscious, hanging limp, dangling from her seat belt. Because my body was turned toward Andy, I was able to steal a glance at my daughter behind him.

Except for a cut over her left eye, Jen’s face seemed to be serene and almost glowing. It was the face of an angel. At that moment the Lord gave me a peace that even though she still hadn’t come to, she would live. God somehow protected me from the actual scene, the horrible sight of her bleeding face and a gash that was so deep you could see part of her brain. Amazingly, months later Josh confirmed that he had seen the same angelic image of Jen that night in the wreckage. What a miracle! Somehow God protected us both from “seeing” what Jen really looked like and gave us another image to focus on instead. What an act of mercy!

The steering wheel had shattered Andy’s pelvis. Both of us were pushed up against the broken windshield and only a fraction of an inch from a wall of steel debris that seemed to have molded around our bodies, as though some invisible barrier had miraculously stopped it from crushing us to death. I could imagine that angels had formed a protective shield around us in that fraction of a second. No one ever came up with a better explanation.

Still fading in and out, I realized I was covered with tiny pieces of glass. They were in my hair, my eyes, my mouth, and my clothes, and stuck to my skin. A policeman was trying to ask Andy questions, but Andy’s only concern was getting us out of the wreckage. “Please help my family first! Help my family! Can you get them out?” he kept repeating. Josh tried to answer the policeman’s questions for him, telling the officer how old he was, how many people were in the car, and other basic information.

“Can you get out, son?” the officer asked. Josh said he could and climbed out through a door. He was freezing, so the officer wrapped him in a blanket. Josh had a broken nose and his face was bleeding, but he could still walk.

Just then, an EMT rushed toward them.

Even in the flickering searchlights, Josh and the paramedic recognized each other. Kristi Vann was a referee at Josh’s basketball games.

“Josh, let me look at you! Who is with you?”

Josh was relieved to see someone he knew. “I’m with my family. They’re still in the van, and they’re hurt really bad. Please take care of them, Mrs. Vann.”

Kristi approached the wreckage and couldn’t tell it had been a van until she looked inside and saw the rows of seats. She started wiping the blood and glass off Jen’s face and assessing our injuries. I heard her tell another rescue worker that Jen had “severe head injuries and is unresponsive. . . . She appears lifeless.” She described me as “semi-conscious and in shock” with “obvious broken bones in her left arm and foot.” Andy had “possible internal injuries” and “broken bones in his shoulder, pelvis, and hip . . . in shock and barely responsive.”

It didn’t take Kristi long to realize that Jen was the most seriously injured, and she started working at once to find a pulse. Meanwhile, a firefighter cut Jen’s seat belt, and she fell into Kristi’s lap. She looked at Jen’s face, which was covered in blood, and saw the horrific gash in her head running from her left eye into her hairline. The flesh was split open to the bone, and the skull was bashed in from the force of impact. Andy and Linda have lost their little girl, Kristi thought. Finally, to her surprise and relief, Kristi was able to find a faint pulse.

“Jen’s alive! I got a pulse!”

Her words penetrated through the chaos and shock. My daughter was still alive!

Jen wasn’t trapped in the van like Andy and I were, so it didn’t take long to get her out.

Four male EMTs were there immediately with a backboard. They strapped Jen’s body to it and ran with her to the nearest ambulance. When Jen’s left leg slid off the board and dangled to the side, Kristi noticed that the laces of her elegant, black high-heeled shoe were still strapped around her ankle. At that moment, Kristi wondered if Jen had taken her last breath. She later told me that every time she closed her eyes for months afterward, that image haunted her.

By now the traffic was so backed up on that narrow country road that the ambulance had to park hundreds of yards from the scene. The ambulance rushed Jen to a soccer field nearby, where a medevac helicopter could land. Jen used to play her games on that same grassy turf, which lay across from our neighborhood.

As he approached the field, the helicopter pilot saw what looked like a war zone, with pieces of vehicles scattered everywhere. He said later that it was the worst accident site he had ever seen. Once they were on the ground, he and the flight nurse quickly brought Jen on board and took off.

Andy and I remained trapped in our vehicle. I could move my head a little, but that was all. Then I felt something tighten around me, and my surroundings started going dark. I was dizzy and claustrophobic. Was I dying now? I began to call out, struggling to breathe.

“Linda!” Kristi’s voice cut through the fog. She had just enough room to get an oxygen mask on me and cover me with a blanket. “The firefighters have to break out the windshield to get to you and Andy! The blanket is to protect you from flying glass.”

Once the windshield was bashed out, I can’t really remember what happened next. To keep me alert, Kristi kept asking me for our mutual friend Julie Clinton’s phone number, but I couldn’t seem to tell her what it was. I was sure I knew it, but the numbers kept floating around in my head and I couldn’t say the words.

To get Andy and me out, firefighters would also have to cut the top off our van. They set to work with power saws, cutting through one twisted window post and roof support after another until they could lift the top in one piece and set it off to the side on the grass. That allowed them to get me onto a stretcher and into an ambulance, but Andy was still trapped by the steering wheel and pieces of the front of the van that were jammed through the fire wall and into the passenger compartment.

Andy had lost so much blood by this time that getting an IV in him was critical. The rescue team, most of whom were volunteers, was doing an incredible job under very tough circumstances, but it would still be a while before Andy was loose. Seemingly out of nowhere, a man in street clothes walked up and saw the critical situation. The man recognized that Andy needed fluids immediately and offered to try to start an IV. Everyone at the scene was working feverishly to handle multiple emergencies at once; now God brought in one more pair of experienced hands at just the right moment.

Kenny Turner was an off-duty fireman who happened to be in the area because he had to pick up a real estate contract. He soon succeeded in getting an IV line in Andy’s vein to administer a large volume of liquids quickly. Had that man not come along when he did, Andy may well have died at the scene. Even then, God was orchestrating every detail. Add one more to the miracles list.

It would be another half hour before Andy was freed from the driver’s seat with hydraulic jacks that bent hundreds of pounds of jagged metal out of the firemen’s way. Andy’s healthy lifestyle—regular workouts and lots of basketball—had helped save his life. As I was carried to the ambulance, I could hear Andy crying out to God for help. “Deliver us, Lord! Help us! Save us!”

Josh had begged to stay and wait for his family, but the rescue workers insisted he go to the hospital. They put a neck brace on him as a precaution and made him lie flat on a gurney as the ambulance raced to the nearest emergency room.

Josh and I were taken to Lynchburg General Hospital in separate ambulances. Jen was being flown there by helicopter. Before the night was over, Josh and Jen would both be sent to other hospitals. When Andy was finally extricated from the van, he was flown to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital since Lynchburg already had our three emergencies to deal with.

As I was en route to the ER, Kristi had a chance to take a closer look at my injuries. My whole left side was injured—my leg was gashed and my foot badly broken; my arm was shattered and my left hand hung limp. I had also suffered broken ribs and serious facial lacerations, and my left eyeball had been dislodged from its socket. Gently yet relentlessly she kept massaging and working on my face, trying to ease the eye back into position. Eventually she succeeded.

As Kristi worked on me, I remember begging her to pray with me. I felt such an urgency to pray for Jen. I knew her life depended on it. Exasperated at Kristi’s apparent lack of attention and still in shock, I grabbed her by the collar and pulled her down to me.

“Kristi, we need to pray right now! Please pray with me!”

“I want to, Linda, but right now I’m trying to save your life.” I had no idea that my left lung had just collapsed. What a blessing that it happened in the ambulance and not while I was still trapped in the wreckage.

Kristi said later that our short conversation in the ambulance that night—the idea of going straight to God first of all in a moment of terrible crisis—changed her life forever.

It would be more than two weeks before I saw Andy or Jen again. By then God would have completely transformed all of us, both as individuals and as a family, and completely rewritten our future. I didn’t know it yet, but even though I was still alive, the old Linda Barrick was dead. And a new Linda was beginning the agonizing, exhausting, and ultimately triumphant process of being born.