Last in a three-part series: After 14 years of focus on the body, Kevin Curnutt starts a new quest

By TIM MADIGAN

tmadigan@star-telegram.com

Late one Saturday afternoon in December, more than 100 North Texas teenagers noisily filled the meeting hall of a church camp near Athens. They chattered and laughed, sang along with loud rock music, and reluctantly quieted when the Rev. Dick Lord, a retired minister, stood at the front of the room.

Lord had known Kevin Curnutt for three decades, as a family friend and as Kevin's pastor at Rush Creek Christian Church in southwest Arlington. After that terrible Sunday in 1981, the minister kept vigil at the hospital. He was one of hundreds of volunteers who were part of Kevin's 14-year rehabilitation effort that ended in 1996. More recently, Lord was an early witness to a spiritual transformation, perhaps the most remarkable part of Kevin's story.

On that cold Saturday, Kevin sat in his wheelchair, a lanky, red-haired man smiling out at the teens.

"I'm glad to introduce a friend of mine," said Lord, 74, who began his ministry in 1960. "He's been blazing a trail I've never been on. His story, his journey, has held a lot of us in very strict attention. He is now my teacher."

The applause died down.

"My story begins when I was 13 years old, a little younger than you all are now," Kevin began. "I was riding motorbikes with my friend, Trey Shelton."

He spoke of gunshots, great suffering, contemplation and finally, answers to questions that have forever bedeviled mankind. For the next hour, the teenagers listened in silence.

Living with questions

A feeling of euphoria followed Kevin's decision to end the grueling rehabilitation program. Although still unable to use his arms and legs, he could move on to the next phase of his life with a measure of freedom, thanks to a high-tech wheelchair controlled with his head. Other gadgetry allowed him to open the door and regulate the temperature of his small apartment built onto his parents' Arlington home. Using voice-recognition technology, he wrote and sent e-mail. He worked as a freelance computer programmer, Web site designer and stock trader. In the evenings, he was frequently seen surrounded by friends at area concerts and restaurants.

But the questions returned almost every night when he was alone. Why had it happened to him? Why had his friend, Trey Shelton, been killed and he had not? Where was God that day, if there was a God? How would he live out his days when he couldn't eat a sandwich himself, or bathe without assistance, or turn the page of a book?

As the years passed, his despair deepened, like an accumulated weight. He began to consider suicide.

"I thought I was going crazy, trying to deal with my situation, the turmoil, the negativity all the time, the depression," Kevin remembered recently. "I needed to find some answers if I was going to survive this life."

Three years ago, Kevin decided that he needed to think. He took time away from his job trading stocks. In nice weather, he sat outside, looking up into the trees and at the sky. Other days he stayed in his room, immersing himself in the thoughts, the painful emotions and memories.

"I came to realize that it's not a question of why this happened, 'Why me?'" Kevin said. "That question is totally irrelevant, unimportant, meaningless almost. The important question is 'How should I deal with it? How would I deal with it?'"

For Kevin, part of the answer was found in the horror of the Holocaust.

Inspiration in books

Trey's father, Ralph Shelton Jr., had mentioned the book on the mornings that he helped with Kevin's rehab. Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People had helped Shelton through his grief over Trey's death and with a series of setbacks in business. Kevin had also heard of the bestseller that became a widely revered manual for successful living. When he began his contemplation, Covey's was the first book that Kevin picked up.

"The way we see the problem is the problem," Covey wrote early in the book.

A few pages later, Covey wrote about Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist imprisoned in German death camps during World War II. Frankl's parents, brother and wife either died in the camps or were murdered in gas chambers.

"One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called 'the last of the human freedoms,' the freedom that his Nazi captors could not take away," Covey wrote.

As he read, Kevin remembered that he owned a copy of Frankl's own iconic book, Man's Search for Meaning, which had been a gift from Dick Lord years before. After finishing with Covey's book, Kevin took down Man's Search for Meaning, and his despair seemed to lift with every page.

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread," Frankl wrote. "They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

If Jews could choose kindness in the midst of the Holocaust, Kevin could choose, too. A gunman's bullet had taken so much, but not that final ability. Kevin came to believe this:

"Anything that happens can be handled with love and kindness, harmony and peace," he said. "You can still take the love and goodness in the world and view the love and goodness in the world, no matter what happens to you and those around you."

Another passage from Frankl's book stayed with him, a quotation from the writer Dostoevsky.

"There is only one thing that I dread," Dostoevsky said. "Not to be worthy of my sufferings."

A deeper reality

The intense period of contemplation and study lasted several months. As the days passed and the cloud of his suffering gradually lifted, Kevin became aware of a reality deep inside of him that was impossible to adequately describe.

"I felt it before I knew what it was," he said. "It was a deep feeling of love and comfort and joy and happiness and acceptance for everything and everyone."

Never an overtly religious or spiritual person, he began to study religious texts, trying to find a vocabulary for what he had discovered. He read the New Testament Gospels, Buddhist and Hindu writings, and found that the inner experience was described in all of them, though in different ways. Christians called it the soul or the Christ within. Buddhists called it True Nature or Buddha Nature. Hindus called it Brahman.

"It is known by a thousand names in a thousand different places," Kevin said once. "But every human has this core, that I believe is love. If you can strip all the external things away, I think that's what you're left with. That spot, that quiet spot in your mind and soul, is God."

Even Richard Tiedemann had that quiet spot, Kevin came to believe.

"Yes, even him," Kevin said of the shooter on Super Bowl Sunday. "He just did not realize it."

Delivering the message

Dick Lord continued to visit Kevin after the rehabilitation ended, stopping by Kevin's home in Arlington a few times a year. Mostly the old friends made small talk about how Kevin was spending his days, or reminisced about the days before the shooting, when Kevin used to tag along after Lord's own teenage son.

But in the spring of 2007, Lord noticed that something about Kevin had changed.

"He began talking to me about how he had come to understand that the event will not determine who he is," Lord said. "He will choose who he will be, and how he will respond to life."

Kevin also spoke of the deep sense of inner peace and love, which he didn't entirely understand but wanted to share. He asked Lord if he could begin by speaking to youth groups at the church. Within weeks, teens at Rush Creek Christian were transfixed as they listened to the tall man in the wheelchair, a person with such an intimate acquaintance with suffering and evil. He would speak to other groups in the years to come.

"Here is someone in a wheelchair and he's been there for 30 years and he'll be there for the rest of his life," Lord said. "He can't do anything. It's just the opposite of what a teenager thinks life is. Yet this person has a serenity about him, and a peace and a calm."

Others began to notice, too. Kevin began to sign e-mail to his older brother with "Much love and happiness."

"Much love and happiness?" Kelly Curnutt asked Kevin when he called. "What's going on over there? What are you smoking?"

"Kelly, that's how I feel," Kevin said.

He began to write about his spiritual discoveries, posting essays on MySpace and Facebook. People around the country became aware of the paralyzed man in Texas with deep insights and a feeling of peace. Among them was Hollywood actress Brittney Powell, who learned about Kevin from a friend in California.

"She was always talking about this friend of hers who was so sweet and kind," Powell said. "She was in a bad relationship, and getting through the day was hard. She had told me about Kevin. I hadn't met him yet, but I would use him as an example. I'd say, 'You're choosing to be [in the relationship]. Kevin didn't choose. But the way you talk about him, he's still 10 times happier than you are.'"

Powell and Kevin began to correspond by e-mail, and they met when she came to Texas to film a movie. But Powell didn't learn how he had been paralyzed until Kevin told the story in an e-mail long after they became friends.

"I was sitting there wanting to throw a brick at my computer screen," Powell said. "I was glad the man was dead. I wanted to be the one that stabbed him in the heart myself. It was a very, very primitive pattern of thinking. And then Kevin flashed through my head. I was the one who was angry, not him. He calmed me down."

A shared awakening

Kevin's awakening also helped to heal those with the most painful memories of the horrible winter day in 1981. A few years ago, he spent the afternoon with Colleyville Police Chief Tommy Ingram. On Super Bowl Sunday in 1981, Ingram had been an Arlington detective who risked his own life to get the wounded boy to safety.

"It was cool," Ingram said of the meeting. "We just had a really good visit. A lot of people would have given up and withdrawn, never excelled or progressed like he's done. It was really neat at this point in my career, not to relive [it] but to discuss something from two different perspectives. I think that day we both left feeling pretty good."

Kathy Strong still lives a few yards from where the shooting took place. Every time she walks out her front door, she remembers the day that she heard gunshots, and saw Tiedemann standing in a murderous trance with his shotgun.

"It never leaves you," Strong said on a sunny recent morning, standing under the trees where the boys were shot. "I'm just so glad Kevin has been able to rise above it. I think he's a hero. A lot of people are learning because of his goodness, his forgiveness as much as anything."

In the living room of another Arlington home sits the statue of a teenage Trey, sculpted by the hands of his father. The grieving Shelton was among those who showed up every week to help Kevin with rehab, watching him groan and grimace and suffer, day after day, trying to move. For years, he felt that of the two boys, Trey might have been the lucky one.

Only recently did Shelton read Kevin's writings and learn about his transformation.

"I was just kind of filled with good," Shelton said. "It's just such a warm deal. To see him lie there and have us pattern [a method of rehabilitation] on him for years, how frustrating that was for me, and how much more it had to be for him. You've got to be proud. It's got to be such a tremendous example for anybody else."

'No future in anger'

On that Saturday at the church camp, the questions tumbled out from Kevin's young audience. The first: Had he forgiven the shooter?

"I just feel pity for him," he replied. "To be that angry and that bitter, to come out and shoot to kill two little boys, it just must have been awful."

Did you hear your friend get shot?

Were you wearing a helmet?

Have you wondered why your friend died and you didn't?

"I was troubled by that for a long time," Kevin said. "But I've learned not to question why things happen, good or bad."

Before you found God inside you, what did you feel like?

"I felt really angry," Kevin said. "Angry at God. Angry at everybody and everything. But gradually I realized there was no future in anger."

The teenagers lingered afterward, many of them kneeling by his wheelchair. One wanted to be sure.

Your message is love? he asked.

"Yes, exactly," Kevin said.

A summons to dinner finally pulled them away. Kevin was smiling as his wheelchair was loaded into a waiting van, smiling as he was driven off into the cold night.

TIM MADIGAN, 817-390-7544

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