Officer stopped to assist an accident when she was struck by another vehicle
By Rex Hall Jr.
MLive.com
BATTLE CREEK, Mich. (AP) — Laura Misner knows her cracked pelvis and the femur that was knocked from its socket will heal with time, that the physical pain will subside.
What will never be gone are the memories — watching the Jeep that had just sent her hurtling through the air as it rammed into two people she had been helping after an earlier crash.
“You wonder why God chose to take them,” Misner, a Kalamazoo County sheriff’s deputy, said of Trevor Stuck, 23, and Brittany Despins, 22. “I question, at times, why the things that happened, happened.”
“ ... It was a realization that I could have died ... and then trying to understand why I didn’t,” Misner recently said while recuperating at the Southwest Regional Rehabilitation Center in Battle Creek.
‘I could hear her before I saw her’
Misner, on her way to a work shift at the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport on Nov. 18, marveled at how clear it was outside, excited about Thanksgiving, as she left her Cooper Township home shortly after 3 o’clock that morning.
She thought about Kalamazoo Public Safety Officer Eric Zapata, a former co-worker who was killed in the line of duty in 2011, and would have been 37 that day. She made a mental note to call Zapata’s mother and sister.
“I felt like Eric was in my heart and I felt good thinking about him,” she said.
Misner got into her car and headed south toward Kalamazoo, her speakers playing the music of her favorite holiday — Christmas.
As she stopped on North Westnedge Avenue at the U.S. 131 Business Loop, she looked both ways for traffic, then spotted a Chrysler Sebring in the median. She wondered, at first, whether the car had been abandoned there by someone overnight.
As she made the left turn onto the inbound lanes of the highway, she slowed and rolled down her window, but couldn’t see much because of the dark conditions. That’s when she heard a female voice yelling from the opposite side of the highway.
“Help us please. Oh God, please help us,” Misner recalled of that voice in the darkness.
She parked on the east shoulder and radioed a Kalamazoo County dispatcher that she would be out assisting at a crash. The dispatcher told her Kalamazoo Township police were on their way to the scene, where an inbound car had rolled over into the median after its driver lost control on a curve near.
Misner tossed her cellphone onto the seat of her car, threw open her door and ran toward the voice.
She would find Despins tending to Stuck, who had been ejected from the Chrysler when it rolled over and ended up on the highway’s outbound lanes.
She said he got thrown,” Misner recalled Despins saying. “I knew it was bad. He came quite a distance.”
Stuck was unconscious, but was “breathing and had great respirations,” Misner said.
Misner asked the driver of a McDonald’s tow truck driver who had come upon the scene to block the northbound lanes.
Soon, Marykay Macquarrie, a Bronson Methodist Hospital nurse on her way home from work, also stopped to help.
“It’s like all these things were falling in line,” Misner said of the nurse’s arrival.
Misner knelt and held Stuck’s head in a C-spine position, with her back to the north as Despins and Macquarrie were on each side of Stuck.
Then, for reasons Misner said she can explain only “as a forewarning or a sense,” she looked up and to her left.
That’s when the Jeep, coming from the inbound lanes and across median, smashed into Misner’s left side, sending her hurtling through the air. Still airborne, she watched as the Jeep ran over Despins and Stuck.
She would find out later that Macquarrie also had been pinned under the Jeep.
“It was surreal,” Misner recalled. “I was struggling to try to figure it out.”
Misner said she came to rest on the west shoulder of the northbound lanes, about 15 feet from where she had been helping Stuck.
She landed on her right side, with her knees near her chest. Unable to move, she began to count and say her ABCs, to test her mental abilities and avoid losing consciousness or slipping into shock.
“I remember it being the worst pain I ever felt in my life,” she said. “I remember thinking that I need to stay awake, that if I fell asleep or gave in to the pain I wasn’t going to wake up again.”
She spotted a man in the distance and called for him, hoping he could get a phone call to her husband, Brad Misner, a Kalamazoo Public Safety lieutenant who was at home.
The man gave her his jacket to stay warm and held her hand. He retrieved his cellphone, dialed the number Misner had given him and handed her the phone when Brad Misner answered.
“I remember telling him that I needed him, that I was in a bad way,” Misner recalled telling her husband.
Brad Misner arrived just minutes later and later helped other officers and first responders get his wife on a backboard and into an ambulance.
“It was such a traumatic and emotional thing to see your wife hurt on the side of the road,” he said. “ ... She’s a very strong woman. She endured a lot and is still enduring a lot.”
Stuck died at the scene that night. Despins died five days later. Macquarrie was hospitalized but recovered.
Misner spent six days at Bronson before being transferred to the rehabilitation facility in Battle Creek.
“We’re just thankful she’s alive,” Brad Misner said. “It’ll be a long road, but she’ll get healed up.”
Misner had been at the rehabilitation facility for a little less than a week.
She has undergone surgeries to repair her femur and doctors put a metal plate in her to keep the femur in place and to repair her pelvis.
Each day brings improvement, and recently she spent time in occupational therapy lifting weights, doing arm lifts in her wheelchair and standing with a walker while keeping weight off her left leg.
“No rest for the wicked around here is what I say,” she said.
Misner is scheduled to leave the rehabilitation center and go home, where she’ll continue with in-home therapy.
“My goal is to get back to work, to get back on my two feet,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to have any limitations.”
Misner and her husband say they’ve been buoyed by the support of family, friends and fellow officers at KDPS and the sheriff’s office.
Brad Misner is a 17-year veteran of KDPS; Laura Misner was a 20-year veteran of the Kalamazoo agency when she retired from there in June and took a job with the sheriff’s office.
She’s had more than 100 visitors since the accident, not to mention the many people who have brought her meals or the group of friends who just a few days ago built a full wheelchair ramp at the Misners’ house in anticipation of her return home.
“It’s been very humbling,” Brad Misner said.
Laura Misner said her will to get better is fueled by her memories of Stuck and Despins, both paramedics for Pride Care Ambulance who were passengers in the Chrysler and were on their way home with two others from a night in Grand Rapids.
“Brittany found it within herself to crawl out of (the car), get out of there and call for help,” Misner, fighting back tears, recounted of the 22-year-old.
“The sound of her voice in the dark calling for help ... I think about what she did to sacrifice to find (Stuck).”
Misner has met with Stuck’s father and spoke with Despins’ family privately at Bronson before she was transferred to Battle Creek.
As it turns out, Despins’ mother works at the Battle Creek rehabilitation center where Misner is being treated.
While she was at Bronson, Despins’ grandmother visited her following a candlelight vigil the family had organized outside the hospital and gave her a small photo of Despins.
That photo now adorns whatever outfit Misner puts on, secured to her clothing by a pin given to Misner by a family friend who, like Stuck and Despins, is a paramedic. The pin, Misner said, is given to paramedics for life-saving efforts.
During her days at Bronson and now in Battle Creek, the photo of Despins keeps her going, Misner said.
“I would look down at this and (know) I had nothing to complain about,” she said. “There’s a reason I’m still here and I don’t want to let anyone down.”
To that, Brad Misner said: “Sweetheart, you’re not letting anyone down.”
