News - Local/State - Andrew Dys

Friday, Nov. 21, 2008

Arrested at graduation, injured in crash, this man still thankful

Allen Brandon should be dead.

A motorcycle crash Aug. 15 was so bad, Brandon's body so mangled, his family was told he had maybe a 1 in 100 chance to live.

Instead, the guy who became a newsmaker for getting "cuffed" in June for honoring his dying wife's wish to cheer their oldest daughter at high school graduation is planning his younger daughter's Sweet 16 party.

One lady from York thought those odds of life from that crash were maybe 1 in 1 million. Jenifer Sutherland has never been more joyful to be wrong.

Sutherland came upon that collision on Celanese Road between Brandon's motorcycle and a car that morning on her way to work in Charlotte. She saw the body and became hysterical.

"I was haunted right from the start; whoever it was wasn't moving," Sutherland said. "It was so bad. I saw a helmet, so I hoped that helped. I didn't think he made it."

Sutherland scanned the Internet and The Herald for obituaries, sought news of the crash for weeks. She could not escape what she saw.

She did not know Brandon spent weeks in intensive care.

Brandon said he doesn't remember the crash and has no memory of any time from the night before until he finally came out of a coma. But he knows now what he found when he woke up.

"Starting at the top, 38 stitches in my head, broke my neck, nerve damage to my right shoulder," Brandon said. "My right hand was broke in nine places. Broke my back. A bunch of ribs. Cracked pelvis in two places. I have a steel rod in my right leg from the knee up because my femur was broken. Steel rod in the left leg from the knee down because the tibia and fibula were both broken. Skin grafts. Broken left ankle. Internal bleeding."

And a spinal cord injury.

That injury means Brandon, a former heavy equipment mechanic, is in a wheelchair and might never walk again.

"I tell doctors, 'No way, that's between me and God,'" Brandon said. "Who says I won't walk? I wasn't supposed to live this long, either."

After the hospital stay, Brandon was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital in Atlanta. One day, one of his many family visitors brought the mail. A letter with no return address was included.

"I first thought maybe it was something about one of my two daughters, that I haven't been home to make sure they were doing all they are supposed to in high school and college," Brandon said. "Because they have been through so much worrying about me. After Renee died, all I thought about was being the best father I could be. So my kids have every chance in life to get a good education. I felt like I was failing as a father."

Then Brandon started to read the letter. Three-plus pages, handwritten. The writer told him how she had seen a man lying in that roadway and never knew who he was. But she had prayed so hard for so long for him. That she read a column by Andrew Dys in The Herald that talked about how a man named Allen Brandon had somehow survived a motorcycle wreck that same day she saw that carnage. That Brandon was that man who honored his wife at the graduation. How he from his hospital bed signed a written apology to get the graduation arrest dismissed. The woman wrote how she understood why he would risk jail to honor his wife. The lady wrote how she wanted more than anything for the man in the column to be the broken man she saw on that road, and that he was alive to read what she wrote.

That woman was Jenifer Sutherland. She had "taken a shot" and wrote the letter to an address for an Allen Brandon in the phone book.

Well, in that rehab hospital where Brandon tried to fix his body, his heart started to heal. That heart that had been broken by his wife's death and his arrest for the crime of fatherhood.

"I was crying so hard, so thankful that people like this lady existed in the world still, that I couldn't finish reading," Brandon said. "Is there any doubt that prayers work?"

His mother, Johnnie Waldrop, a soldier at his bedside since the wreck, had to finish reading the letter aloud. Family, nurses, wept in Georgia.

Today makes two weeks since Brandon came home from that Atlanta hospital. He doesn't worry too much about the big picture. Short-term matters most. He will eat with his family on Thanksgiving. The next day, he will watch his youngest daughter turn 16 and know like all fathers of 16-year-old girls that the birthday means officially the baby you have spent your whole life trying to raise right is almost grown.

Then he will get ready to go to school after the holiday break for a parent-teacher conference that he's waited months for. He will have to use a wheelchair to get in that classroom. He will demand to know everything like all great fathers do.

And Jenifer Sutherland will know that the man she saw on that pavement is still one terrific father.