by Lisa Fenn
Big Ma had done as she was trained to do—guard people. She posted at her grandson’s bedside day and night. She wielded her battalion of prayer and besieged the angels to walk with him through his valley of the shadow of death. She trusted God to make everything better, and she had convinced herself that He did. He had to, for she knew no other way. She herself was unequipped to give Leroy the tools he needed most—words to unlock the pain anchoring him to the basement beneath her.
“Oh, I got this here to show you too.” Big Ma headed to the entryway closet and pulled out a black leather jacket with slices down its sleeves. “This is the jacket Redd had on when he was hit by the train. I don’t know why he won’t wear it no more. I cleaned it up real good.”
I thanked Big Ma for her time and headed downstairs, now understanding that waiting out Leroy would not get him to open up to me. His ability to express himself remained locked up in chasms and closets that he could not open. He had never been given the language or the permission to be anything other than “just fine.” I found him in his usual spot, controller in hand, slaying dragons and conquering demons in worlds he could control, perhaps a symbolic sort of therapy for him.
Leroy wasn’t playing a game with me, though. Unbeknownst to me, the media had pursued him before. And he had learned that precious little comes of that.
Akron Beacon Journal reporter Jim Carney arrived to an empty newsroom on the morning of December 7, 2001. A twenty-four-year veteran on the staff, he looked the part. He was sparse in the scalp, silver in the beard, and quick on a tip. Most days he went straight out on assignment, but that Tuesday was the sixtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and Jim was assigned to write a commemorative piece. As he settled in, activity on the police blotter piqued his attention.
CHILD STRUCK BY TRAIN.
ELINOR STREET, OFF OF MARKET.
Jim’s oldest son, Will, worked as a railroad engineer in St. Louis and had volunteered on these same local lines as a teenager. Because of Will’s passion, trains had long been a centerpiece in the Carney family. Jim was familiar with the city’s routes. He had seen photographs of engines that had plowed into abandoned cars stuck on the tracks. Jim shuddered, thinking of how a two-hundred-ton screaming locomotive had surely just obliterated a child.
CHILD RESPONDENT AND
EN ROUTE TO AKRON
CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL.
This child was still alive? Jim slipped his coat back on and dashed to the tracks. By the time he arrived, the emergency crews had departed. The train had lumbered on, its conductor unaware that he had run over a young boy. Other than a few smears of blood, nothing noteworthy could be seen. Jim gathered what limited details existed from the hospital public relations staff and wrote up five hundred words about the hazards of walking along open tracks for the next morning’s edition.
At a hospital press conference one week later, Jim spoke with Leroy’s mother about the possibility of meeting Leroy and following his recovery for the paper. Katrina said that would be all right, and just like that, Jim and photographer Ed Suba became regular fixtures in Leroy’s hospital room during his two-month inpatient stay. They observed Leroy’s care and rehabilitative routines. Ed documented Leroy’s bandage changes, wound cleanings, and dunks into the whirlpool for “soapy bubbly baths.” Leroy shaped suds into cottony eyebrows and beards to make everyone laugh by pretending he was a bubble-horned sea creature. Both Jim and Ed were surprised by how well the boy seemed to be handling the trauma.
“As a father, I felt terrible for Leroy, for what he had been through,” Jim said. “But what really got me from the very beginning was his contagious smile. He was just a sweet-faced kid with this humongous tragedy that changed everything for him, yet he didn’t seem to be bummed. He joked around. He didn’t display any anger. I was really interested in telling his story as he went through the healing and therapy because he seemed to be taking it so well. It seemed like we could all learn from him.”
But it was Leroy who needed guidance, particularly after hospital visiting hours, when the train returned. Neither Jim nor Ed was privy to the night terrors that engulfed Leroy in a looping film strip of screeching steel and creaking boxcars, their graffiti flashing in startling detail. The heat from the wheels smelled like burned toast when they sliced through his legs that day, and the same nauseating aroma filled Leroy’s nose at night. These flashbacks triggered piercing phantom limb pain, which left Leroy wondering if he was losing his sanity.
The torment typically subsided by morning, and Leroy greeted his care team and visitors with the smile that was beginning to garner him praise. The floor psychologist knew better, though; each time she visited, she charted the same thing in terms of the clinical stages of grief—denial, depression, anger, and acceptance. Leroy was in denial. In his opinion, denial was the only thing keeping him sane—the only antidote to those nights that kept coming for him.
Untrained in trauma recovery, Jim and Ed continued to marvel at Leroy’s daytime disposition. His affect confused others at the hospital as well. Clinicians enrolled him in a pediatric trauma study testing whether Inderal, a beta blocker that controls blood pressure and heart rate, could also relieve initial symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Psychologists randomized Leroy into the control group where he did not receive the trial drug. Yet they found Leroy responded to his stress better than many children who had received the trial medication. One psychologist hypothesized that Leroy’s stress was instead alleviated by the tenderness of his nursing staff, considered an “unmeasured intervention” by researchers.
“His care team gave him loving attention. They caressed him with healing physical touch. They wallpapered his room with get-well cards from the community. They spoke encouraging words. And we started to think that perhaps these were not expressions Leroy was accustomed to in his family relationships. He responded to his care team in ways that were more positive and more pronounced than children who come from attentive families,” Dr. Norman Christopher, director of pediatric emergency medicine, explained. “Leroy skewed our data, but that was a good thing in his case.”
The nursing staff nicknamed him King Leroy for the way his smile lured them into his service. He lapped up their positive energy and enjoyed being the center of warmth and attention—a role far different from his usual place as the shy middle child in a family where his mother’s preferred communication style was yelling. In his hospital room, Leroy enjoyed video games and a television, amenities he did not have at home. Growing up, the Suttons were so poor that Leroy and Tony imagined watching programs together at night.
“What kind of show you watching?” Leroy would say from the bottom bunk.
“A dog show,” Tony would answer. “But I’m getting real tired of these stuck-up poodles. Switching over to some cartoons.” They clicked their imaginary remote controls and launched into animated voices for their adventuresome story lines.
Jim and Ed followed Leroy home from the hospital in February 2002, where they were immediately faced with the unkind realities of Leroy’s new normal. Though the residents of the Akron area raised about $9,000 for Leroy’s accommodations, the front porch still lacked a ramp. Tony and Katrina scrambled to hoist Leroy up five steps to the stoop while the wheelchair remained parked in the muddied snow.
“When we went into the house, I was kinda like ‘Whoa,’” Ed remembered. “The place was dilapidated, no furniture, trash on the floor everywhere. If there was anything that was going to set Leroy back, that would cause him to be depressed, it was this. He’s home, but he’s home to this. To have to deal with this on a daily basis as a normal kid would be hard enough, but to be there after what happened to him, well, I just went ‘whew.’”
But Leroy had not learned about the haves and the have-nots yet; to him, this was his home, and it felt good to be back. His mother, brother, and sister camped out beside him on the living room floor, and that’s where they stayed for the next two months. Katrina used the donations to buy things that w
ould keep the kids entertained—gaming systems, Pokémon cards, board games, action figures. For a while it felt like a perennial family pajama party, wrapped in a renewed appreciation for one another. When Leroy needed to go to the bathroom or to bed, Katrina slung him onto her back and carried him up the stairs. She spoke gently to Leroy and stroked his head. Tony no longer zipped Leroy into a sleeping bag and flung him down the stairs. Little Keyiera curled up on Leroy’s lap when he was in his wheelchair and snuggled beside him when he lay in bed. She begged to help change his bandages, angling the gauze into the gaps in Leroy’s tissue to clean them out just right. Big Ma brought heaps of chicken and greens down from Cleveland on the weekends. Ed snapped pictures. Everyone laughed. And little King Leroy continued to feel like royalty.
Jim and Ed followed Leroy through all of his milestones that spring—physical therapy, doctor’s appointments, and in April 2002, his return to school. The Akron school district reassigned Leroy to Case Elementary, a school with a single-floor layout across town from Leroy’s neighborhood elementary school. Administrators excitedly began enhancing their disability accommodations with great care once they learned of Leroy’s enrollment.
“When I found out he was coming here, I told my mom, ‘This is the boy we’ve been praying for,’” said Tracy Cason, one of Leroy’s fifth-grade teachers at Case. “He was on the prayer list at most everyone’s church.”
The staff measured desks and doorways to ensure Leroy’s wheelchair would fit. They lowered the shelves in his locker and nailed together wooden ramps. Helpers were assigned to carry Leroy’s books and open doors. When Leroy finally arrived, the students who had followed his recovery in the news welcomed him as a sort of superhero who had stared down the mighty locomotive.
“The reporter from the Akron paper was here and the photographer with a camera lens that was about fourteen feet long,” remembered Mary Anne Maxwell, another of Leroy’s teachers. “Leroy had a lot of eyes on him.”
“I wondered how being unlucky enough to be hit by a train warranted such fanfare,” Leroy remembered. “Then I looked at the date on the wall. It was April 1, 2002. April Fool’s Day. My life felt like a big joke.” The irony was reinforced by his classmates’ stares—innocent ogles that left him feeling like a deflated punch line. So Leroy reached back for the trick he learned in the hospital: he smiled.
“It is hard to fit in with that entourage. But Leroy had that million-dollar Ronald McDonald smile, and it really helped the rest of the kids to relax,” Mary Anne remembered.
Two weeks after his return to mainstream life, Leroy underwent additional surgery to increase the range of motion in his left knee. Ed and Jim attended Leroy’s weekly physical therapy appointments, where Leroy floundered on his new prosthetic legs. “Are you practicing at home?” Jody Kreitzburg, Leroy’s physical therapist, would ask. “You have to be up and walking on these every day.” Neither Leroy nor Katrina answered. Jody’s bubbly youthfulness clashed with Katrina’s austerity. When Leroy faltered, Katrina blamed Jody for letting her son fall forward; Jody believed Katrina was holding him back.
“Leroy didn’t want to wear his legs,” Katrina said years later, “and I wasn’t gonna make him.”
At the time, Ed scratched his head, realizing he hadn’t photographed Leroy practicing with the legs at home, and how, as the weeks wore on, he hadn’t noticed much of Katrina either. Though she had seemed attentive initially, the permanence of her son’s condition and the reality of the effort required to manage his care had begun to take a toll on her.
“One photo I took seemed to say it all—Katrina alone in a corner, her forehead pressed into her palm and the weight of the world upon her shoulders,” Ed remembered. “She came in to this as a young, struggling mother, and now you throw in multiple weekly doctor appointments, more surgeries, and more expenses. There was always a problem to solve. I got the sense that if she could have avoided it all, she would have.”
Katrina didn’t nuzzle up to Leroy on the floor anymore. Nor did she carry him up to bed; she said his dead weight threw her shoulder out. By necessity, Leroy grew more independent. He scooted around on his hands, pulled himself up the stairs by the railing, and stood on his left stump to use the sink. By May, Leroy was a no-show at twenty-seven out of forty-six physical therapy appointments—sessions he didn’t know he had. Jody documented dozens of voice mails left for Katrina before logging her final note in Leroy’s chart: “After no response from patient’s family over the last three months, patient is to be discontinued from physical therapy at this time.”
This was fine by Katrina; haggling with the transportation service for all those appointments got to be a hassle, she said. Out of a job and out of donations, Katrina was scraping her family through each day on food stamps and Leroy’s monthly disability check. She fretted over past-due rent, broken-down cars, and her aching shoulder—all within earshot of Leroy. Tony stopped playing video games beside Leroy; being with his little brother for too long triggered his own flashbacks and induced guilt for letting Leroy out of his sight that day. “I started to think it was my fault that everyone was in such a bad mood,” Leroy said.
His smile no longer worked at home, but he kept beaming for the public. Ed continued visiting; there wasn’t much to photograph, but he still came just in case. One woman who saw Leroy in the national news flew clear from Texas to visit him. The emergency responders who pulled Leroy from the tracks were honored with a Star of Life award for their prompt, lifesaving action. At the banquet, Leroy was interviewed alongside the response team, who squeezed him tightly and celebrated his recovery. Even the Akron Children’s Hospital Miracle Network named Leroy one of their eight “Miracle Kids” for that year’s telethon. Television producer Laurie Moline interviewed the family for the hospital’s campaign.
“When I pulled up in front of his house at ten or eleven o’clock in the morning, there were twelve or thirteen guys sitting on the porch drinking beer and talking loudly,” Laurie remembered. “When I went in, looking for a place to shoot Leroy’s interview, it looked like an abandoned house. There was one ripped black couch in the middle of the room. Open trash bags everywhere.”
Laurie took Leroy, Tony, and then Katrina out on a side patch of grass and immediately noticed the difference between the resilience levels of the Suttons and other families she interviewed for these awards. “They weren’t forthcoming or comfortable sharing their feelings,” Laurie remembered. “None of them said much more than a yes or a no.” The Suttons lacked the words to describe the noose of helplessness, failure, and guilt they each felt tightening around their necks.
Leroy’s hospital care team tried scheduling the family for counseling after the accident. The note from their initial May 2002 visit read: “Patient states that he was ‘run over by a train while on my way over to school.’ Patient drops his head and refuses to answer any more questions related to this incident.”
Katrina never took her sons back. “We could counsel ourselves at home just as well,” she said.
Hospital psychologists knew therapy was imperative; young trauma victims learn how to process their ordeals through the messages communicated to them by trusted adults. They rely on those around them to equip them with the correct language to navigate their feelings and accurately interpret facts. Leroy was receiving conflicting messages. Members of the media and event coordinators praised his courage and treated him as an inspirational wonder boy; but at home, Leroy felt beguiled more than beloved. The dissonant tug-of-war between his public trauma narrative and his private truth left him anxiously wondering: Was he a victor or a villain?
In one candid moment, Katrina admitted to Jim that coordinating Leroy’s follow-up care wore her down and prevented her from working consistently. “I need help,” he quoted her as saying in the paper. “I need assistance from somewhere.”
Jim and Ed genuinely cared about Leroy and felt bad for Katrina’s stress. But trained to maintain journalistic distance, they did not take steps t
o try to alleviate the family’s hardships. Leroy’s story was one of the biggest they had ever worked on, and they focused intently on what was happening, earnestly documenting Leroy’s daily activities, appointments, and events. Yet they overlooked the critical why questions: Why was this family languishing in poverty in the wake of public support? Why was Leroy still scooting around on his hands instead of walking on prosthetic legs? Why wasn’t this young trauma victim receiving psychological counseling?
In their defense, Katrina typically confounded their understanding of what was happening beneath the surface, tossing out explanations that always seemed just plausible enough to satisfy their suspicions. She was just about to get a car, just about to get that new place, just about to get herself a job. Then everything would be better, she would say. If you didn’t probe into her cyclical patterns of unemployment, transience, and drug use, your tendency would be to suppress your misgivings and sympathize with her.
“Something felt amiss when I filmed at Leroy’s house that day,” remembered Laurie, “but it never occurred to me that a parent would not or could not do everything possible to support a child. It wasn’t even in my realm of possibility that a mom would not take a kid in Leroy’s position to physical therapy or counseling.”
Like his mother, Leroy grew skilled at telling people what they wanted to hear, avoiding deeper questions. He guaranteed Jim that he wanted to walk. Just need to get these pressure sores healed up, just need to get through one more surgery. Then everything would be better, he would say. Leroy repeated a collection of upbeat clichés, such as “The past is past. The future is now.” And then there was his smile, that bedazzling grin, reassuring people that he was indeed the world’s most resilient child.
Leroy cut the ribbon at the Akron Holiday Tree Festival in November 2002. Wheeling in and out of more than two hundred sparkling Christmas trees, he declared that he was thankful for how the loss of his legs had positively transformed his life. This implausible perspective closed out the Akron Beacon Journal’s one-year anniversary article on Leroy’s accident. The six-page spread, entitled “Comeback Kid,” depicted Leroy’s recovery and his new life as a double amputee, incorporating eighteen of Ed’s three thousand photographs taken throughout the year. Beacon Journal editor Jan Leach penned a preface that encouraged readers to “look beyond Leroy Sutton’s pain and scars and see the face of courage.”