“Oh my gosh, he’s in our lane!”

Even as the words left Kem’s mouth, the huge Ford F350 crested the hill and collided at full speed (nearly 80 miles per hour) into the rented minivan. The date was June 21, 2007; the place, a stretch of highway 50 in Colorado between Canon City and Royal Gorge.

Not What They Expected

That anyone could be extricated alive from the crumpled mass of metal that had been a new Chevy Uplander is impossible to imagine, but Kem’s wife Lauri survived. “I was in a little cocoon. Everything was smashed around me,” she recalled in an interview months later. She was rushed by ambulance to St. Thomas More hospital in Canon City where doctors saw massive injuries, including a lacerated liver and bladder and shattered pelvis. Kem suffered only minor cuts and bruises. The couple’s teenaged daughters, Alex and Sarah, managed to get out of the car, both badly hurt. Alex had a ruptured spleen and broken ribs. Sarah had compression fractures in her lower spine. (The driver of the truck was unharmed.) The family was on vacation from their home in Florida, traveling to Royal Gorge for whitewater rafting and horseback riding. Like any other vacationers, they expected a good time, not a catastrophe.

Finding a Way Home

“Air Compassion America. This is Clara.”

The call to the organization’s lead mission coordinator came from Florida on June 28, 2008. The person on the line was Lauri’s sister, Suzanne, who was looking for a way to bring Lauri home. She’d learned of Air Compassion America from a friend and colleague of Kem’s, a fellow air traffic controller named Steve. Read the rest of this entry »