Nearly every Tuesday morning for nine years, Ralph Shelton showed up to help Kevin Curnutt, moving his arms and legs in rehab sessions because the boy couldn't move them himself. On those mornings, Shelton told the latest Aggie joke, talked about his horses, brought Kevin up to date on his family, and otherwise kept his heartbreak to himself.
No one would have blamed Shelton for trying to banish any reminder of his own son's death. Seeing Kevin would always bring back what happened Jan. 25, 1981, when Kevin and Shelton's teenage son, Trey, rode their dirt bikes into the crosshairs of Richard Tiedemann. The reclusive neighbor who couldn't stand the noise took up his shotgun to silence the boys. Trey died instantly. Kevin survived, but buckshot from Tiedemann's weapon destroyed part of his brain.More than two weeks after the shooting, Kevin finally emerged from a coma. But in the years to come, his only hope of walking again was an experimental program called patterning, a grueling, labor intensive regimen that went on for 11 hours each day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.Airline pilots and pastors were among those who volunteered for what became known in Arlington as Kevin's Team. There were engineers and homemakers, grandmothers and high school students. And Ralph Shelton."It never entered my mind not to do what I could do," Shelton said years later. "I would not have been able to live with myself. How could I say that just because I lost something, I'm not obliged to help them?"On those Tuesday mornings, Shelton watched Kevin grow from a pudgy teen to a lanky young man. Despite all the time and hard work put into therapy, Kevin groaned and grimaced to move just an inch on his own, and although he was generally in good spirits, there were days of rage and frustration. Shelton never really shook the notion that his son might have been the lucky one."We were grateful that Trey didn't have to put up with what Kevin had to put up with," Shelton said. "I just think it would have been such a difficult thing. You lie there and pattern, knowing that his brain was alive and his body was dead. You just had a hard time not crying every week and thinking about it when you left."After nine years, Shelton, a prominent Arlington developer, began to show up less often, blaming the demands of his business."What a struggle it was," he said. "And for all practical purposes, it wasn't doing much good."One miracle at a timeBut Kevin would not give up, nor would his parents, Jerry and Gail Curnutt. Kevin was not supposed to survive in the first place, and after one miracle the family came to expect more."I prayed so hard, 'If he can just live,'" Gail Curnutt said years later. "Well, after a while, we realized he was probably going to live. Then, if he can just have his intelligence. Well, if he can just speak. If he can just hear. It was one of those things that I always wanted the next thing, whatever it was."The mother's prayers began in 1981 on Super Bowl Sunday, when much of the nation settled in to watch the Philadelphia Eagles and Oakland Raiders. The newspapers were also filled with the news of American hostages returning from Iran. Jerry and Gail planned to watch the game after teaching country-Western dance lessons to a youth group at the family's church, Rush Creek Christian. They knew Trey and Kevin would be riding dirt bikes on Ralph Shelton's rolling acreage just across Bowen Road.A police officer showed up at the church shortly after 3 p.m. He said two boys on motorbikes had been shot.For Jerry Curnutt, the next several hours were surreal. At Arlington Community Hospital, doctors said Kevin was not expected to survive for more than a few minutes. Those minutes stretched to hours. Dr. Carlos Acosta, an Arlington brain surgeon, had been able to stop the bleeding during emergency surgery. But a shotgun pellet had gone in one side of Kevin's skull and out the other, obliterating part of his brain. In the unlikely event he survived, Kevin would almost certainly live in a vegetative state.In a hospital waiting room, Jerry Curnutt heard an erroneous news report that both boys had been killed that day. But Kevin survived the first night. In the nights to come, Jerry slept in a sleeping bag in the hall of the intensive care unit. Gail rarely left Kevin's room.Kevin's classmates at Gunn Junior High School sent taped messages and songs. A few days after the shooting, doctors removed Kevin from a ventilator and were surprised that he could breathe on his own.His family didn't know that Kevin occasionally woke up for a few seconds, heard the world around him and drifted back into a coma. More than two weeks after the shooting, his periods of consciousness began to last longer, and Kevin laughed out loud while his mother and a nurse talked at his bedside. His jubilant family quickly devised a means to communicate, asking Kevin to blink when they pointed to letters in the alphabet.Although he could not say so at the time, the last thing Kevin remembered was coming over the hill on his bike, then waking up in the intensive care unit. He wondered why Trey had not come to visit him in the hospital. That was why, as he lay paralyzed, Kevin blinked out the four letters of his friend's name.Kevin's older brother, Kelly, was at the bedside when his parents broke the news."I remember him crying when hearing that story," Kelly Curnutt said. "It was more closing his eyes, squeezing them. We knew then he was conscious and thinking. But apart from being sad, what other things was he feeling?"After many months of therapy, spoken words also came back, one by one. Kevin could also see and hear. There was no permanent cognitive damage. "It's extremely rare to see such a good recovery," Acosta said. "Many times the patient recovers some but is totally blind, or loses speech or loses hearing, or has severe problems with seizures, or severe problems with the severe anger and destructive behavior. With Kevin, none of those things happened."Nor would the patient and his parents accept Acosta's long-term prognosis that Kevin would never again have the use of his arms and legs."Courage and perseverance," Acosta remembered of the family. "Another set of parents would have sent him to the nursing home."Instead, the Curnutts and their army of volunteers got to work.Volunteers by the dozensWell into his physical therapy, Kevin could barely move his arms. He could scarcely lift his head or hold it upright. There was little hope for improvement until early in 1982, when Jerry Curnutt heard on his car radio about a facility near Philadelphia. At the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, the Curnutts were told about a program that might teach healthy parts of Kevin's brain to compensate for the parts that were destroyed.But the cost was great. The physical demands of the patterning program were enough to overwhelm the most dedicated professional athlete. It would also require scores of volunteers and the constant attention of Kevin's parents. Jerry Curnutt quit his job at the Internal Revenue Service. His wife retired as an elementary school teacher and the family lived off retirement savings and gifts from relatives. During one summer, Kelly Curnutt's job was helping his brother recover."This [patterning] involves five people moving Kevin's body in crawling motions, the purpose being to [tell the brain] 'This is how it feels to move,'" the Curnutts wrote in a memo to prospective volunteers. "Patterning is done for five minutes 15 times a day. The quality of the rhythm of the movement is of the utmost importance."Before you volunteer, we would like to stress that we are asking quite a bit of you," the family wrote. "Patterning is fairly hard work. We try to keep the attitude of an athletic training program."Word went out at Rush Creek Christian Church, and scores of people responded. Dozens more volunteers also came from Kevin's school in Arlington. By the time the patterning began in April 1982, the weekly rehab schedule had been filled with more than 100 names.Within months, Kevin could inch his way down an incline from a table to the floor. He learned to balance on all fours and finally to crawl. Three years into the rehab, a woman who witnessed a patterning session wrote:"The boy's brightness seemed to set the room aglow. Instead of an emaciated invalid, I met an alert, physically attractive young man whose muscle tone seemed amazing for one who had been paralyzed for three years. I secretly wondered at the ability he had developed to be able to trust so completely on so many people."Volunteers also marveled at Kevin's endurance and attitude. It wasn't often, maybe once a month, that the glacial pace of progress became too much. On those days, Kevin wept and trembled with frustration. On those days, he most missed his friend, Trey. On those days, he was most likely to ask, "Why me?"After eight years of patterning, Kevin could make his way back and forth across his room, creeping inch by grueling inch.On Sept. 24, 1991, in a ceremony at Arlington City Hall, Mayor Richard Greene recognized 36 members of Kevin's Team, Ralph Shelton among them."More than 200 people have given their time to Kevin. The time frame is almost too long to comprehend," Jerry Curnutt said that night in the council chamber, his son sitting in a wheelchair nearby, surrounded by the volunteers. "If it was six months or a year or two years, that's one thing. But this long. ... Our amazement at what they've done is exceeded only by our gratitude. We think it is incomparable, unprecedented. It would be difficult to find this many people who have been committed to a cause this long."The patterning went on for another five years.Rebuilding a lifeKevin's legs could eventually support his weight, but his brain could not be trained to make them move. The years of work had significant emotional and physical benefits, but by the mid-1990s, despite Kevin's resolve and the efforts of his family and so many others, it was clear that he had reached the limit of physical healing. After 14 years of patterning, the decision to stop ultimately was Kevin's alone."I just thought it was time to move on," he said years later. "I seemed to have hit a plateau. Of course, there was a tremendous amount of inertia that built up and it was hard to overcome that. Giving it up was very difficult, but any more effort on all our parts would just be too much to ask of me, too much for my family and too much for the volunteers."Which led to another night in Arlington, Jan. 9, 1997, in the back room of a local barbecue place.Doris Green and her daughters shared a booth. They had patterned every Sunday night for eight years."I'll be over every Sunday, Kevin," Green said that night. "It's a habit."Nearby sat airline pilot Marvin Baker, who had volunteered from the beginning, as had Dot Mittel, Dolly Wadlington and Lou Beth Hendrix."I'm a relative newcomer," Jim Lee said that night. "I've only been coming for 12 years. It was my job to make sure Kevin didn't get too full of himself."That night, Kevin's red sweater matched the color of his full beard. In a few months, he would be 30 years old. His father raised a straw to Kevin's lips so he could sip a soft drink."I want to tell everyone how much I appreciate all you've done for me over all these years," Kevin said. "I'm forever in your debt.""You've done as much for us," a man said."We feel like your family," a woman said. "You just thought you're getting rid of us."Kevin's Team laughed together, hugged each other and dispersed into the winter night. In the years to come, volunteers heard about Kevin's new life working with computers and trading stocks. He was frequently seen at restaurants and concerts, sitting in his wheelchair, surrounded by friends.But after all that work, he could barely move his arms and legs. Kevin would never be able to eat a sandwich alone, or bathe, or drive a car. Life would achieve a certain normalcy, but the questions never went away, especially when he was alone.Why me? Why Trey? Where was God on that January day when Richard Tiedemann picked up his weapon?The mounting agony eventually threatened his sanity and his life, presenting a daunting new challenge. But this challenge he would face alone, in the stormy recesses of his heart, and in the solitude of his one-room apartment. There, he would find that his greatest healing was yet to come.TIM MADIGAN, 817-390-7544
