​My Story

I was born on May 8th, 1984
 

• I was the youngest of three sons

• Later my younger sister was born

• Sports were big in my family and I was raised learning  to play every sport

• I was also fairly smart growing up

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• Rockin' the speedo at 6 years old

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God

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• I was raised Catholic and went to a Catholic grade school

• I believed in God no more or no less than the average kid

• As I got older, my relationships with people grew, as did my relationship with God

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For The Most Part I Was A Happy Boy

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• I had many friends growing up and I had no idea what would happen in the future

• When I was in the second grade, my Godfather, who was also my cousin, fell off an overpass coming home from a Red’s game

• He was in a coma three years before dying

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Childhood

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• I believe childhood ends the moment you realize you won’t live forever and that you too will eventually die

• For me, childhood began ending in the second grade when my cousin fell

• It began to finalize ending with his death in the fifth grade

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Resisting Childhood Ending

• Even with my cousin’s death, I tried to resist becoming an adult

• I wanted to be a child forever

• I wanted to live a normal life

• I kept playing sports and being a typical kid

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My Early Life

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• Aside from my cousin passing, I lived a pretty normal childhood

• I played every sport imaginable and I was fairly good at most of them

• When I was in the 6th grade, my team won the junior pro national championship in basketball

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8th Grade...I made the bowl cut look hot

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High School

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• I was always looking forward to going to school at Covington Catholic

• On the entrance exam, I scored in the top three and won an academic scholarship

• I loved my first year, I played varsity football and I made all region for freshmen basketball

• As freshman year ended, I was loving life

• I had a girlfriend I liked

• I had more friends than I needed

• Summer rolled around and I partied all summer like it could never end and I could never get hurt

• That was my flaw…………

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Sophomore Year

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• As sophomore year started, I looked at school only as a way to play football

• I began to play more- rotating in on defense, returning kicks, and doing other small things

• I still had the same girlfriend and I loved life

• This was my football picture from that year

• I was cute

• Kind of chunky

• But cute

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Friends

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• At the time I had two best friends

• One played soccer and football at Covington Catholic

• And one played football at Beechwood

• I was in a few fights but I really didn’t hate anyone and no one really hated me

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September 17th, 1999

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• On Friday, September 17th, we played Beechwood High School in football

• We got crushed

• Since football was such a big part of my life, I was upset

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September 18th, 1999

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• After football practice in the morning, I went to the Covington Catholic verse Beechwood JV football game with my girlfriend and a few of her friends

• We watched my one best friend play for Covington Catholic and my other best friend play for Beechwood

• I also had more friends on both teams

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That Night

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• Later that night my two best friends called me from the ones house

• They didn’t tell me what they had been doing before I got there or what we would be doing that night

• I paged my brother and asked him to pick me up at our house and drop me off at my friend’s

• Being a cool brother, he did

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My Friend's House

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• He dropped me off and my two friends already had the night figured out

• They told me we were going to a party in the cemetery

• They didn’t tell me how we were getting there

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We Were All Only Fifteen

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• My best friend who lived where we started the night said his sister’s boyfriend gave him the keys to his car

• I knew it was dangerous, but these were my two best friends

• We left his house and before going to the cemetery we stopped down the street at another kid’s house

• Adding ignorance to stupidity we started drinking

• I had a little more than a beer in my system when I went out front to toss football with another kid who was already there

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As The Night Went On

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• We left his house and went to the cemetery

• He wasn’t driving too great

• We got to the party at the kid’s house who lived in the cemetery

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The Cemetery

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• At the party, we talked to people and just sat around for a while

• Some people called us stupid

• Some acted like nothing was happening

• No one stopped us

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• We stayed there a while

• Then we left again

• We went and got gas

• We came back

• And then we left one more time

• This time we drove around the cemetery

• He was messing around speeding

• Before we got out of the cemetery he sped around one last corner…………​

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At University Hospital

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• The passenger went for help and the driver stayed with me as I laid there fighting for my life

• When the paramedics found me, my right lung was collapsed

• My jaw was dislocated and fractured

• Paramedics say my head was swollen to the size of a basketball

• I was air cared to University Hospital

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Coma

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• Somehow, I lived through the first night, but I was still unconscious

• Having been wrong once, doctors now said I would never wake up from a coma

• I spent two weeks in ICU

• Time passed and I still lay unconscious

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• I was declared brain dead on October the 5th  and was transferred to Children’s Hospital

• Months passed and I still lay in a coma

• My right lung collapsed again

• As they lifted my arm to put in a chest tube, they dislocated my shoulder

• One night I opened my mouth so wide that it snapped the wires in my mouth

• After my Godfather, thoughts of me never waking up weren’t too unreal

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Hope

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• In November, they discovered that I might not be brain dead

• After three months, I started to show signs of life

• I opened and closed my hand on call one day

• Hope had gotten so small that it made my mom cry

• That was my first sign of life

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Waking Up

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• In December, I began to regain consciousness

• I got confused and mad at the world real quick

• At first, the only thing I remembered from before the wreck was my family and close friends

• I was so angry and confused that I didn’t even want to be alive

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• My injury was so severe that, at first, I couldn’t stand up or even mutter small words

• I was so angry at the world that I didn’t think about God

• My anger grew as people told me what had happened that night

• For the longest time, it was the anger that fueled my recovery

• I was discharged five months after the wreck and still couldn’t even stand

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Starting Over

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• After being discharged from the hospital, I went back for the second half of the school year

• That was my 1st real time learning about God since the wreck

• I soon became mad at God also

• I wondered why God was punishing me

• Mad at the world and God, I had little left

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• Nothing special happened that summer and my life was losing meaning

• I learned that I had to repeat my sophomore year since I missed so much time

• As my second sophomore year started, I was becoming more and more angry at God and the world

• I was asking why I was so easy for God to hurt

• My faith kept getting smaller as bad things kept happening

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One Year

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• I stayed mad at God and the world as the one year anniversary of the wreck came up

• One year passed and it was nothing to anyone besides me

• I realized that the only things I was remembering were the bad things that happened in life

• That made it very hard to live

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Time Went On

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• I was raised learning how selfish suicide was and how it was taking the easy way out

• So I never even considered suicide

• Only remembering the bad things meant that I was constantly watching a horror film over and over again in my mind

• I started remembering more from before the wreck

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• As time went on, I became very unhappy

• Everyone always expected me to smile, and, even though I was unhappy, I smiled

• Even though I was smiling, my unhappiness soon grew to pure hatred

• Suicide began to cross my mind

• The only thing that kept me from taking my own life was knowing it’s selfish and taking the easy way out

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• I had gotten through my second sophomore year

• Even though it seemed like no time at all had passed, the two year anniversary came around

• By this time, I could walk a fair amount with a cane and I could talk some

• At this time, I had little faith in God

• And I thought if there was a God he must hate me

• It got to the point where my only real motivation to waking up in the morning was in hopes that I would be in another accident that would kill me

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September 11th

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• I came into class on this Tuesday to find everyone staring at the TV

• Someone told me what had happened in New York in the morning

• I knew my cousin, who was my Godfather’s brother, worked in the World Trade Center

• But I didn’t know where

• After what had happened to his brother, I thought there was no way he was hurt

• Everyone joked about it, but I had the worst feeling

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• Just before lunch I was called into the gym

• I saw my dad sitting in the stands with a blank look on his face

• I knew

• I said “Brian,” he nodded, and my head dropped

• A single tear formed in my eye

• I quickly wiped it from my eye and raised my head

• Right then I quit believing that there was even a God that hated me

• Now I didn’t care how selfish it was or that it was taking the easy way out, suicide seemed like the only way

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• One week later marked two years since the wreck

• I started considering how I would kill myself

• This went on for around a month

• There were constant reminders on TV and the radio of what had happened that day

• I think everyone knew what was going through my head

• My friends told me that in October they were going on retreat

• They asked me if I was going on it

• I decided I might as well go

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Retreat

• I went into that weekend not knowing what to expect

• I heard a lot of different stories- rape stories, adoption stories, drug stories- and my story didn’t seem so tough anymore

• I realized everyone suffers

• The whole point of life is to suffer

• It’s what we do in that suffering that makes us human

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• I went and came back from that weekend with a new view on life

• I no longer considered suicide, I was just happy to be alive

• It brought back my faith in God because I realized that I hurt myself, and God kept me alive

• I felt selfish that I thought my story was any more difficult than anyone else’s

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Now

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• As far as the present is concerned, I still only remember the bad things

• But I’ve learned to cherish the good things and hang on to them long enough that it drains out the bad things

• Enjoy life, but live it so that you’ll have more days to enjoy

• Respect life

• I didn’t

• And it hurt me

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One Last Thing To Consider

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• As far as the present is concerned, I still only remember the bad things

• But I’ve learned to cherish the good things and hang on to them long enough that it drains out the bad things

• Enjoy life, but live it so that you’ll have more days to enjoy

• Respect life

• I didn’t

• And it hurt me

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• Even in a coma………

• I was still a very cute boy!

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• Me And My Pretty Sister

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