Jerry Gaston became a quadriplegic after an unlicensed, uninsured driver fleeing from police crashed into the car Gaston was riding in and paralyzed him.

Gaston sued the driver and the city of Springfield in circuit court and won the largest verdict in Sangamon County history. The money should have been enough to take care of all his medical and personal needs for the rest of his life.

Gaston has never seen a penny and probably never will.

Of all the work I’ve done at The State Journal-Register, this is the story I’m most proud to have told. I wish I could have done more for Jerry and his family.

Photographer T.J. Salsman documented Jerry’s life in photos. This was my first attempt at narrative writing on a significant news story.

Broken life / Reckless driver forever changes Jerry Gaston’s world
Aug. 27, 2006

Jerry Gaston’s eyes flutter open about 4 a.m. most days.

He wishes he could sleep longer, but painful muscle spasms jar him awake. Four to five hours of sleep a night is all he can manage.

He can hear his fiancee, Minnie Blue-Bond – his wife for all intents and purposes – breathing heavily next to him. Occasionally, he hears one of the children stir in the next bedroom.

He can’t see out the window behind his head, but he can tell dawn is breaking from the way the hues in the room change and from the furious chirping of birds outside.

He orders his arms and legs to move, but they don’t. He longs to be able to go to the bathroom by himself. Instead, he lies in bed and stares at the ceiling.

Trapped in a broken body, he must wait until someone can help him sit up in bed. Sometimes one of the children in the house will wander in, reach for Jerry’s wrists, get some traction on the floor and pull him up into a sitting position on the edge of the bed.

Other times he must wait for Minnie to wake up or for her son, Carlos, who took on the role of Jerry’s caretaker, to come by the house and get him up, dress him and lift him into an electric wheelchair. The process can take an hour or two, depending on how things go.

Jerry is a quadriplegic. He has been paralyzed from the neck down since May 5, 2002, when a man with a history of traffic violations and criminal activity ran a stop sign and crashed into a car Jerry was in. The man was being followed by two Springfield police officers who had seen him run a stop light at 15th Street and South Grand Avenue and tried to pull him over.

The impact snapped Jerry’s neck, fracturing three vertebrae and damaging his spinal cord. An 8-inch surgery scar runs from the base of his neck to just below his shoulders from where his doctor, Stephen Pineda, repaired the injury. He almost died in the hospital the morning of the crash when his heart stopped beating and he developed respiratory failure.

After nearly two months of hospitalization and physical therapy, Jerry went home, but not as the same man he was before the accident. He never will walk again, and the injuries probably shortened his lifespan. He is 47. National health statistics show he probably will live until his early 70s.

Years stretch out before him. He faces each day knowing he can’t do the things he loves to do, things that make a man feel like a man – catch a fish, go to work, put on a tie, mow the yard, make love. No more bike rides, no more roughhousing with the seven adopted and foster children who live with him and Minnie.

“My life has changed a whole lot,” Jerry said. “There’s things I used to do I can’t do anymore.

“The kids and I used to go fishing. Now I can’t do any of that. I used to fire up the grill. I can’t get on the grill anymore. I can sit there and watch people cook, and if they don’t know how I tell them how.”

At 6 feet 3 inches and 220 pounds, Jerry almost seems too big for his electric wheelchair. It can’t get wet and it will take him only as far as the batteries last, but it’s the only means of freedom for a man whose body has become his prison.

Jerry, whose closest friends and family sometimes call him by his middle name, “Wayne,” grew up in Calhoun, Miss., and moved to Springfield about nine years ago to be with Minnie.

He has five sisters and two brothers and has met his father only twice in his life. He made it through 11th grade but was suspended in high school for pulling a girl’s wig off her head. He never went back because he got a job hauling “pupwood,” Mississippi slang for wood used to make paper.

After that he had a series of other low-paying jobs – pouring concrete, landscaping, cutting timber, working in a factory making couch frames, transferring bananas off boats onto trailers and farm work. At the time of the accident he was a steward at the Hilton Springfield, earning $7.75 an hour. The job didn’t come with health insurance.

He loves Minnie. They planned to get married just before the accident. Jerry still is legally married to a woman in Mississippi and intended to go there and press for a divorce, but the crash happened and all the plans were put on hold. He says the Mississippi woman knows he is paralyzed but still hasn’t granted him a divorce.

Jerry sits quietly in his chair, and there’s a despondence about him. He occasionally lights up at a joke and will let out a hoarse laugh. He used to be more playful and ornery, according to Minnie.

“Before he got hurt, he was that same typical high school boy, into everything,” she said. “He made me so mad, sometimes I chased him out of the house with a broom. I’d be doing something and he’d come in and just irritate everybody and everything, then he’d take off out the door. He’s just an old spoiled brat.”

But now, “When he’s in a lot of pain, he gets irritable. When we know he’s grouchy, we just kind of stay away from him or ignore him.”

He takes about a dozen pills a day, including painkillers, muscle relaxers, allergy medicine and others. He drifts in and out of sleep in his chair during the day and snores loudly when he naps. He keeps an eye on the children, calling out to Minnie if one of them is getting into something. Sometimes he blocks the doorway to the living room so they can’t scamper off.

The children love him, wheelchair and all. When he greets them at their school bus stop, they hop on the sides of the chair and ride with him back to the house or stop at a park on the way. They accompany him to the grocery store when he goes shopping for Minnie.

“It was all I could do when he was in the hospital to keep them from up there where he was at,” Minnie said. “I didn’t want them to see him like he was in intensive care.

“There were so many machines, he couldn’t talk to them. I was scared it would devastate them.”

Jerry won’t discuss the night of the crash, not even with Minnie. After four years, he still hasn’t discussed it with his friend, Orrin Holman, who was driving the car he was in that night.

“Sometimes he rides over here and we sit outside and talk. We never talk about the accident. To this day we’ve never talked about the accident,” said Orrin, who also was injured. “I asked him to ride with me (that night), so I feel like a little bit of this is my fault.”

Jerry and Orrin relived the ordeal earlier this year when a civil lawsuit they filed against the driver who ran the stop sign, the city of Springfield and the two police officers went before a jury in Sangamon County Circuit Court.

After eight days of testimony and two hours of deliberation, the jury determined Jerry was entitled to $24.5 million in damages, a record award in Sangamon County. But they decided the money should come from the driver, not the city of Springfield.

The driver, Derek Brown, is a Southeast High School dropout who is in the Sangamon County Jail because of a similar incident Christmas morning. He has no driver’s license and no auto insurance. Jerry’s chances of ever seeing a penny from the verdict are slim. His attorney has begun the process of appealing.

By the time the suit went to trial, Jerry’s medical bills already had reached more than $414,000. The cost of caring for him for the rest of his life is estimated to be somewhere between $4.7 million and $10.3 million.

Minnie does what she can to make ends meet. She shops sales, puts two-sizes-too-big coats for the kids on layaway when she finds them at clearance prices, makes food that will get the family through several meals at a time. Occasionally, she has had to seek help with bills, especially when natural gas prices got so high last winter.

Jerry has a medical card and receives social security income. Minnie also receives social security income and about $3,700 a month from the government to help her provide for the children.

But the bills keep coming.

She filed bankruptcy in October because Jerry’s medical bills had mounted so high and debt collectors were hounding her. She just couldn’t take it anymore, she said. It was granted in April.

Minnie is trying to save enough money to rent a hotel room so she and Carlos can give Jerry a proper bath in a handicapped-accessible bathroom. He usually gets sponge baths, but from time to time he needs to be submerged in water, Minnie said. Jerry’s wheelchair will not fit through the doorway of the tiny main-floor bathroom in their home on Paul Street.

The bathroom sink is broken, so the family uses the bathtub faucet for washing hands and brushing teeth. They’ll have the sink repaired when they save up some money, they say. There is a second bathroom in the basement where the kids take showers.

Chunks of plaster are missing in the hallway and from the door frame of Minnie and Jerry’s bedroom. The doorway is just wide enough for the wheelchair to fit through, but it does require some skill on Jerry’s part to line the chair up just right. Sometimes he has to line it up two or three times before he can get out of the room. Scuffmarks on the wall are evidence of the tight fit.

Workers from the Springfield Center for Independent Living built a wheelchair ramp on the front of the house after Minnie, Carlos and a caregiver accidentally dropped Jerry on his back while carrying him down the front steps in his wheelchair not long after he was sent home from the hospital. His doctor was so upset that he got Jerry bumped up on a list of people who needed ramps built.

The ramp makes life easier, but the front storm door opens into the ramp, complicating Jerry’s comings and goings.

Jerry travels only on rare occasions because the family’s 1993 GMC van is not equipped with a wheelchair lift. Minnie’s son used to pull the wheelchair and Jerry up into the van but had to stop after injuring his own back doing so.

When the weather is cold, Jerry spends his days and nights mostly cooped up in the house. But as soon as it warms up, he spends hours outside in his yard, soaking up the fresh air. Besides going to the bus stop and park with the children, he sometimes rides to the grocery store to do some shopping.

Does he struggle to come to terms with what happened to him?

“No,” he said calmly, adjusting himself in his wheelchair.

Does he just accept it?

“I have to,” he said.

Can he be thankful for anything?

He pauses.

“Just that I’m living,” he said, “and that Dr. Pineda did a good job on me, you know.”

2002 accident that resulted in Jerry W. Gaston’s paralysis
Aug. 27, 2006

Sequence of events

1. About 1:40 a.m. May 5, 2002, patrol officers see Derek L. Brown speeding southbound on 15th Street across Brown Street. Brown stops for, then runs a red light at 15th Street and South Grand Avenue. Officers begin following the car.

2. Brown runs the stop sign at South 13th and Spruce streets. Officers activate overhead lights and notify dispatch of a traffic stop. The siren was used only at intersections.

3. Brown runs the stop sign at Loveland Avenue and Spruce Street and turns off his headlights while approaching 11th Street.

4. Brown runs the stop sign at 11th and Spruce streets. He then collides with a northbound car driven by Orrin W. Holman. Jerry W. Gaston was a passenger in this car. The impact pushes Holman’s car into a third car driven by Michael A. Perkins. Seven people were injured in the accident.

Wrong place, wrong time / Night unfolds in tragedy for six
Aug. 27, 2006

Something must have fallen out of the sky onto his car, a dazed and bleeding Orrin Holman thought as he lay in the wreckage of his Lincoln Continental.

Maybe it was a tree. One second he was driving up 11th Street. The next second … BAM!

He could hear his friend, his “road dog,” Jerry Gaston, moaning from the back seat. Holman asked if he was OK.

“I can’t move my neck,” Gaston responded.

Holman, in severe pain himself, blacked out, waking up only when he heard the sound of the Jaws of Life as firefighters tried to free the two men from the car. Gaston and Holman were taken to the hospital, as were four other innocent motorists and the reckless driver who caused the crash.

Doctors later determined Gaston was paralyzed from the neck down. Holman had a broken hip and pelvis. Four Springfield teenagers returning from singing with their church choir in Carbondale had injuries ranging from glass embedded in their skin and eyes to fractured bones.

If ever anyone was in the wrong place at the wrong time, it was these six.

Four years later, their bodies still are healing, medical bills remain unpaid and they continue to wait for an apology.

***

In the hours preceding the crash, the victims were at home, returning to Springfield or resting after a hard day’s work. Their paths crossed at 11th and Spruce streets at 1:42 a.m. May 5, 2002.

12:30 A.M.

Orrin Holman was relaxing on his sofa, watching a movie on television. It was Saturday night, and he wasn’t quite ready to go to bed.

About 12:30 a.m. Sunday, his phone rang. A friend wanted to know if he could give him a ride to his girlfriend’s house to pick up his truck. Holman agreed. About 25 minutes later, he pulled into the friend’s driveway, across the street from Jerry Gaston’s house on Paul Street.

Gaston had returned home from working a double shift at his job as a steward at the Hilton Springfield and was sitting outside under his carport, enjoying the night. He called out to Holman.

Holman’s friend said he was ready to go. Holman asked Gaston if he felt like riding along.

“No problem,” Gaston said.

The friend got in the front passenger seat of Holman’s silver Lincoln Continental with “BIG O 38″ on the license plates. Gaston climbed into the back seat behind Holman.

When they pulled up at the girlfriend’s house on Bryn Mawr Boulevard, they noticed several people gathered outside, one of whom had a baseball bat.

The friend, it turned out, hadn’t quite told Holman the full story about why he needed a ride to pick up his truck. He left out the part about how he’d gotten in a fight with his girlfriend earlier and left when she called police.

Holman and Gaston weren’t looking for trouble; they only intended to do Holman’s friend a favor. Holman told the friend to get out of the car, that he and Gaston were leaving before things got out of hand.

“Just stay in the back,” Holman told Gaston as they pulled away. “There’s no need for us to get in any trouble.”

They headed back for Jerry’s house. Holman stopped on Bryn Mawr at 11th Street, then turned north. Three blocks up the road, he saw his friend’s truck lights come up behind him, then go around the Continental. Holman got in the curb lane and drove on.

The friend made the green light at Ash Street, but it turned red before Holman got there.

“This is your last limousine ride. Don’t get used to it,” Holman wisecracked to Gaston in the back.

The radio on the Continental didn’t work, and Holman had the front windows cracked because it was a pleasant night. He drove through the green light at Laurel and approached Spruce Street.

There was nothing – no revving of engines, no squealing of tires on pavement, no sirens, no flashing lights reflecting off the buildings – to warn that a westbound car was about to crash into them. All they heard was a loud bang and the sound of metal twisting.

10 P.M.

Casey Joy, Michael Perkins, Marqueta Stewart and Latricia Ousley had sung the Lord’s praises earlier that Saturday evening.

They and other members of the choir from Love Deliverance Evangelistic Church had driven that afternoon to Carbondale, where their pastor was scheduled to preach at a church fellowship. The teenagers jumped at the chance to get out of Springfield for the day.

After the service, the church served a meal and the Springfield group gathered in their cars about 10 p.m. to make the 170-mile drive home.

Along the way, the four-car caravan of choir members pulled in at a gas station for fuel and to let the riders stretch their legs. Some of them switched vehicles. Perkins got into the driver’s seat of Ousley’s car.

The plan was for the caravan to head back to the church, and from there the members would make their way home.

The four friends chatted, eager to get home. The girls eventually fell asleep, and Perkins and Joy continued talking. Perkins drove up Interstate 55 to Stevenson Drive, then turned north onto 11th Street. The windows were cracked, and the radio was on low.

They didn’t know what hit them.

“I didn’t see anything at all,” Perkins said. “All I remember is hearing a boom, and I was knocked unconscious. I don’t remember hearing a siren, and I don’t remember seeing any lights flashing.”

Joy didn’t see anything either.

“All I remember was waking up and the police officer flashing a light in my face,” he said.

They later would learn that a red Dodge Spirit, driven by an unlicensed, uninsured man named Derek Brown, ran the westbound stop sign on Spruce Street, crashed into Holman’s silver Lincoln Continental and sent it slamming into the side of Ousley’s Buick Century.

1:40 A.M.

Derek Brown set out for his girlfriend’s house, driving her red 1993 Dodge Spirit. He’d been at a friend’s house near 15th and Stuart streets.

Two Springfield police officers, Chris Stout and April Smiddy, were sitting in a marked patrol car about a block away at 16th and Brown streets with the headlights off. They watched the Dodge heading south on 15th Street as it crossed Brown. The car was going fast enough that it caught Stout’s attention, so he put the squad car in gear and began rolling forward along the curb.

The officers watched the car stop momentarily at a red light on 15th Street at South Grand Avenue, as if to check for cross traffic, then go through the light while it was still red.

The officers decided to stop the vehicle and give the driver a citation for running a red light. They watched him turn right onto Spruce Street, blocks ahead, and continued following. Then they watched the car run a stop sign at 13th and Spruce, at which point they activated the overhead lights on the squad car and tried to close the gap between them and the Dodge.

The officers turned on one of the squad car’s sirens but kept it on only when they approached intersections. Smiddy radioed dispatchers in between siren wails that they were trying to stop a car.

Around 12th and Spruce, the headlights on Brown’s car went off. He later testified in a deposition that a floor mat got caught under his accelerator, and the headlights went off when he tried to turn on the dome light so he could see the mat. He initially denied that he was trying to elude the officers.

Seconds later, Brown ran the stop sign on Spruce at 11th Street and sped into the intersection, where the Spirit crashed into the side of Holman’s Lincoln, thrusting it into the side of the car carrying the four teenagers.

A moment later, as the two police officers pulled up, Smiddy radioed dispatchers that there’d been a “10-50,” an auto accident. Stout told Brown to stay put, and he and Smiddy checked on the victims. Ambulances were on the way.

In an October 2002 deposition with Bruce Beeman, the lawyer for Holman and Gaston, Stout testified that he didn’t remember whether Holman or Gaston said anything to him at the crash scene.

“From your observation of the crash scene, was there anything Orrin Holman, the driver of the car that was hit by the suspect red vehicle, was there anything he could have done to avoid this?” Beeman asked Stout.

“I don’t know sir. From what I saw, no.”

Brown testified during a deposition that he had been speeding to his girlfriend’s house at 11th Street and Loveland Avenue so he could get out of the car and go inside before the officers pulled him over. While he initially testified he didn’t know a police car was behind him, he later admitted he saw that it was a police car when he was on 12th Street. He said the patrol car had no overhead or headlights on.

“It was like they was trying to sneak up on me,” Brown said in the deposition. “They didn’t want me to know that they was following me. But I knew it was them.”

THE AFTERMATH

All seven motorists were taken by ambulance to Memorial Medical Center.

Brown suffered a bloody lip and a broken shoulder blade, which required his arm to be in a sling. He was released from the hospital three days after the crash and was taken to the Sangamon County Jail.

Joy, now 21 and a hair stylist, has scars on his right arm, mostly near his wrist, from shards of glass that had to be removed. Ousley had glass in her eye, and Stewart had a broken collarbone.

Perkins, also 21, suffered fractured ribs that left him in pain for weeks. He was treated and released from the hospital the day of the crash and given medicine to help relieve the pain. He had no insurance and still owes on his medical bills. He is a manager at a McDonald’s.

“I still have to tell people not to touch or slap my chest,” he said.

“For a couple months, driving down that part of the street, I would always think about the crash. Sometimes Casey and I’d be in the car together, and he’d point and say, ‘Hey, Michael … Spruce Street.’ I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I know.’ ”

Holman suffered a fractured hip and broken pelvis on his right side as well as two herniated discs that he can’t afford to have repaired. He was off work from his job at the Illinois Secretary of State for nine months. Creditors pursued him for unpaid bills. He filed bankruptcy in March 2004. Friends stopped coming around. He stopped answering the phone and said he contemplated suicide.

Gaston remained hospitalized for almost two months after an initial surgery to stabilize his broken neck. He never will walk again.

Holman still has occasional flashbacks to the accident. He rarely drives at night anymore.

Then there’s the guilt.

“Every time I see Jerry in that wheelchair, I’m in pain because I believe part of this is my fault,” he said. “I asked him to ride with me.”

Violations are a never-ending story for Brown
Aug 27, 2006

Just six months after Derek Brown was paroled from prison for the crash that paralyzed Jerry Gaston, he fled from police and nearly crashed into another car, authorities say. The resulting charges were just more in a long string of traffic offenses.

On this day, Christmas morning 2005, Brown fled from a Springfield police officer at speeds topping out at 90 mph on Taylor Avenue and just missed hitting a car when he ran a red light at Stevenson Drive, according to police.

A Springfield police officer sitting in the parking lot of Southeast High School about 3:10 a.m. watched a white Chevrolet truck speeding southbound on Taylor Avenue. The officer pulled out and began following Brown, who continued to pick up speed, police said.

Brown allegedly changed lanes frequently without signaling and crossed the middle line multiple times. As the truck recklessly approached Stanton Street, the officer activated the lights and sirens on his squad car.

Brown allegedly sped through a red light there and continued speeding south. He drove through a red light at Stevenson and nearly struck a blue two-door car that was heading east on Stevenson, police said.

Brown then drove the truck over the median and pulled into the parking lot of an apartment complex at 110 West Lake Shore Drive. He allegedly jumped out of the truck and ran from the officer, who chased him but lost sight of Brown behind a tattoo shop.

Other officers arrived and found Brown hiding in some bushes on the south side of a house along the road. The officers threatened to stun him with a Taser if he didn’t come out with his hands up. He surrendered, police said.

Officers found a loaded blue steel .22-caliber revolver sitting in plain view on the driver’s side floorboard of the truck, according to the police account of the incident.

Sangamon County court records show Brown, 26, has received 57 traffic tickets since 1997. Of those, 17 have been for driving on a suspended license. He has not had a valid driver’s license since 1997, when the Illinois Secretary of State’s office suspended it because he failed to appear in court.

In 2002 the secretary of state issued a “safety responsibility suspension,” apparently as a result of his role in the crash that paralyzed Jerry Gaston. In 2005, the state issued an “unsatisfied judgment suspension” because Brown didn’t pay a court judgment.

He also has a criminal record, including arrests for battery, unlawful use of weapons, disorderly conduct, marijuana possession, domestic battery and theft. He was sentenced to six years in state prison for aggravated reckless driving for the crash that injured Gaston and five others. He served three years and was paroled in June 2005.

Sangamon County State’s Attorney John Schmidt declined to comment on Brown’s driving record or what can be done to keep reckless drivers off the road, saying he didn’t want to appear biased since Brown’s Christmas morning case is pending.

“Recidivism is an issue we deal with on a daily basis, and we seek sentences that are fair and just and do our very best in that effort,” Schmidt said.

Brown did not respond to written requests for an interview that were mailed to his home and to the Sangamon County Jail.

However, Illinois Rep. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, offered his take on Brown and other drivers like him. Rose, a former prosecutor in Champaign County, recently sponsored a bill that stiffened the penalties for driving uninsured. He said he was “completely outraged” by Brown’s conduct.

“The problem with this whole thing is that people make a career out of being misdemeanants. They’re idiots and have no concern for themselves, let alone anyone else,” Rose said. “And over time, in the worst-case scenario, it can have life-altering consequences for some guy that happens to run into them.”

Rose said it all comes back to the same question: How does society deal with people who don’t care about what society thinks?

“I will say that it is an extremely vexing problem because by its very nature these people don’t care what the state legislature does or thinks, and if they have to go to prison for two years they don’t care,” he said. “They’ve proved that.

“They don’t care about anybody or anything. And so what happens is we end up writing more and more laws to put them in prison and as soon as they get out they go right back to doing what got them in prison in the first place.”

Brown has been in Sangamon County Jail since his Christmas arrest. His bond was set at $25,000. A trial is scheduled for Oct. 16. His attorney, Scott Hanken, declined to comment on the case because it is pending.