Spencer Shea: one year later

The family of Spencer Shea marked the one-year anniversary of the car wreck that forever changed their lives by visiting the ICU nurses at Stony Brook University Hospital who helped bring the 14-year-old boy back from the brink of death.

Spencer and three other teens were passengers in a car driven by Spencer’s older brother Luke, then 19, on Jan. 30, 2010, when Luke lost control of the car on Osborn Avenue, near Reeves, sometime after 1:30 a.m. The car hit several trees and overturned, partially ejecting Spencer, who was not wearing a seat belt.

Spencer, a Riverhead Middle School student, was critically injured in the crash. His forehead was shattered by the impact, a fact that EMTs responding to the scene of the crash said was initially masked by the bandanna Spencer was wearing on his head that night. The bandanna, acting as a pressure bandage of sorts, kept his skull intact and helped buy Spencer some time that night, according to Riverhead Town Volunteer Ambulance Corps first responder Tom Barry. The bandanna, along with the frigid air temperature and a bag of frozen peas applied to the boy’s head by a resident of the house near the crash, all worked in Spencer’s favor, Barry said.

But the boy’s injuries were so bad, the ambulance crew couldn’t keep him stabilized.

“You actually died,” Barry told Spencer when the Shea family visited the ambulance headquarters in September to thank them for saving Spencer. (See story and photos.)

Barry and fellow EMTs Bob Bork and Joe Oliver performed CPR on the child and brought him back.  Spencer clung to life as a Suffolk County MedEvac helicopter whisked him to the university medical center, 25 miles away.

Spencer’s parents, Kathleen and Mike Shea of Riverhead, awakened by the phone call every parent dreads, were told by the police officer to hurry to Peconic Bay Medical Center, because their son was being transferred to Stony Brook.

“The words ‘Stony Brook’ hit like a ton of bricks,” Kathleen wrote on a Facebook page she started to chronicle her son’s long and difficult recovery. “No one goes to Stony Brook for scrapes.”

The Sheas rushed to Peconic Bay, only a couple of minutes’ drive from their Riverhead home, but arrived just as the helicopter was taking off.

“I remember feeling sick and saying out loud, ‘Oh my God, not Spencer,'” Kathleen wrote.

But it was Spencer in the helicopter. The other passengers in Luke’s car, who, like Luke, were all wearing seat belts, escaped serious injury.

Luke was arrested by Riverhead Town Police and charged with driving while intoxicated and vehicular assault. (He subsequently pleaded guilty and is serving a one-to-three-year sentence at the Greene County Correctional Facility in Coxsackie, N.Y.)

Kathleen and Mike rushed to Stony Brook, where they were able to see Spencer briefly before he was taken into emergency surgery. He had a bloodied bandage around his head and his eyes were swollen and purple, his mother recalls. The ER doctor told them Spencer had very serious head injuries, his forehead was crushed, and he might not survive the surgery.

The Sheas spent the next four-and-a-half hours waiting, worrying, crying and praying, while surgeons removed bone fragments, glass, plastic and dirt from Spencer’s brain, and stitched his head back together. As they waited, they relived every moment of that fateful day, trying to piece together how Spencer wound up in his brother’s car that night. He was supposed to be sleeping over at a friend’s house, Kathleen said.

They had forbidden Spencer to hang out with Luke — who had moved out of his parents’ house — or drive with him, Kathleen said, because they didn’t like Luke’s lifestyle and didn’t trust his driving. The Sheas had an argument with Luke just two days prior to the crash about Spencer driving with him. Luke wanted to take Spencer to the mall, and the Sheas refused permission. But Spencer disobeyed his parents, lied to them about where he was that evening, and went to hang out with his older brother, figuring his parents would never know the difference.

“I wish I just stayed home. I wish, I wish, I wish,” Spencer, now 15, said in an interview Sunday. “My Mom and Dad always say what’s done is done,” he said, “but…” Spencer’s voice trails off in regret.

By all accounts, it’s a miracle that Spencer is alive and cognizant enough to harbor such regrets. Even though he survived the surgery, his doctors warned the Sheas their son still might not make it, his injuries were so critical.  

The hours and days following Spencer’s first surgery “were pure agony,” Kathleen wrote. But the boy pulled through and has been on a steady road to recovery ever since. After six weeks in Stony Brook and six weeks in rehab at St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson, Spencer came home on April 22. He was well enough to start the ninth grade at Riverhead High School in September.

“He is not the Spencer he was before the accident, and he may never be,” his mother says.

Among other things, he has double vision. He had surgery to “tighten” his eye muscles Jan. 21 in the hopes of correcting the condition. But, Kathleen says, there might be brain damage also at play. There’s no way of knowing whether, in time, his brain will “lock in” and the double vision will go away, she said.

Spencer still has a long way to go, but one year later, he is, quite miraculously, alive and doing well, Kathleen said. He’s started taking guitar lessons again. He loves to build and make things, and his favorite class at Riverhead High is his technology class. He loves cars and aspires to be an auto mechanic. He’d love to work on race cars some day, he says.

For the Shea family, the past year has been more difficult and, in some surprising ways, more uplifting than they could have ever imagined.

The accident turned their lives upside down in many ways. But the family was embraced by a community whose love and support exceeded any expectations, Kathleen said.

“It’s amazing what strangers will do,” she said. As she lists the many kindnesses, her tone of voice is still incredulous: meals, grocery shopping, chores, child-care, cash donations, community fundraisers.

“It’s just amazing. We are so grateful,” Kathleen said.

Even as Spencer struggled to survive and recover, his oldest brother Luke, struggled to come to terms with what he did.

“I can’t take back what I did that horrible night in January,” Luke wrote from prison in a message to Riverhead in June.  “I can’t take back what I did to my brother, or what I’ve put him through. I can’t take back the pain and suffering I’ve put countless family and friends through. All I can do is make sure something like this never happens again,” he wrote. (Read the full text of his message here.)

Luke is in a work-release program in Coxsackie and speaks to high school students about the dangers of drinking and driving, and making bad choices that you live with the rest of your life — if you’re fortunate enough not to kill yourself because of those bad choices:

“Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I liked to party. I also liked to drink, and I never thought twice about driving drunk,” Luke wrote in June. “I got a DWI two months after putting my car on the road, and over the next eight months, I got into three accidents – all three while I was driving drunk.”

But Luke is not the only evangelist in the Shea family on the subject of drinking and driving.

Asked what he would like to say to the community on the anniversary of the accident, Spencer replied, “I hope from what you’ve seen, you’ll never, ever, ever drink and drive.”  

Then he added, “And thank you. Thank you to the EMTs and the doctors and nurses who saved me, and thank you to everyone for all the support.”