Pansey family recalls tragic accident with gracious hearts

PANSEY — Keith Jacobs could be anybody’s teenage son.

He is involved in his youth group at church. Math and multi-media are his favorite classes at school. He likes to shoot hoops in his backyard — two hours worth when he gets home in the afternoons. He plays video games and talks on his cell phone in his room. He has lots of friends.

So when Keith’s mother received that telephone call from her husband, Jeff Davis, on the afternoon of June 8, the first day of summer vacation for Ashford High School, she tried to stay calm.

“I had the day off from work,” Christina Davis said. “I was coming from Dothan. I had been to the grocery store. I was going to make lasagna that night. Jeff was telling me there’s been an accident. Jeff kept saying he was sorry. It was very scary.”

Fifteen-year-old Keith had been jolted off a platform and into an auger that crushes mulch at his father’s place of employment. Keith’s legs were trapped in the massive machine at Summerford Pallet.

“I was helping Jeff culling mulch,” Keith said. “I was on the platform to be sure (the mulch) didn’t clog up the machine when a piece of wood came up and knocked the platform out from under me. I fell straight in.”

Davis said he heard a thud and turned just in time to see his stepson slipping into the machine. Immediately, Davis hit the kill button to stop the machine.

That quick action undoubtedly saved Keith’s legs and his life.

At 2:20 p.m. a call came in to the Dothan central dispatch. A minute later and the Dothan Fire Department was on its way. Minutes later an emergency helicopter had landed at the Ashford business, and a trauma team from Southeast Alabama Medical Center was en route.

“The chief had asked me to stay in the office. He was on his way out there,” Dothan Fire Marshal Danny Appling said. “Not 15 minutes later he called and asked me to go to Southeast Alabama Medical Center and pick up a surgery team. I hauled six people out there.”

As soon as Appling saw the situation, with Keith penned from the knees down, he feared the worst.

“I grew up around heavy equipment,” Appling said. “I see him from the waist up. The fact that he was still alive made me feel better. I felt like they would save him, but not his legs. It made me sick when I saw him.”

Dr. James Jones led the trauma team, which consisted of an anesthesiologist, a vascular surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon, and nurses.

Davis remembers well what he heard the doctors say upon arrival that day.

“They said amputate,” Davis said. “I said no. I think everybody thought it was so bad because the mulch is colored red. They saw all this red and didn’t know if it was blood or not.”

Paramedics, firefighters, and a welder brought in from a nearby business, worked for more than three hours to disassemble the machine and free Keith.

Temperatures that day reached the mid-90s and the sun bore down with no mercy. Two firefighters, in full turnout gear, were treated for dehydration.

“We spent a hundred dollars that day on Gatorade,” Appling said. “The machine was leaking oil and it was hot, hot, hot.”

Keith’s blood pressure was continually monitored. He was given IVs and bottles and bottles of water. He continued to wiggle his toes but the extent of the damage to his calves was not known.

“They thought he had five total breaks in his legs but it turns out it was two – one in each leg,” Davis said.

Keith was finally freed shortly after 5 p.m., and flown to SAMC, where he underwent surgery. The muscles on both calves were cut to relieve swelling and four days later, pins were put in both legs. Nine days after the incident, the teen was released from the hospital.

He began the summer with the use of a wheelchair. He graduated to a walker. Not too long after school started back, Keith was using a crutch.

“He carried it more than he used it,” Christina Davis said.

Today, the dark-headed sophomore at Ashford High School walks with a slight limp. He wears a brace on his right leg, suffering nerve damage to the right ankle. He cannot flex his right foot and is not quite up to running, jumping and playing basketball, but he is getting there. After four months of physical therapy, he has been released to use the weight machines on his own.

Today, he sits down with family in Dothan, like any teenager might, to enjoy a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. But it is with a strong belief that God gave him, and his family, much to be thankful for.

“I’m glad to have my legs. I’m glad to be alive,” Keith said.

He shuffles a little in his chair, stares straight ahead and adds: “I’m grateful. Most people don’t get out this lucky.”

He uses the term “luck,” but no one believes it was chance that saved him.

“After his surgery, we prayed and prayed and prayed,” Davis said. “They wanted to do a bone graft from his hip to his leg. We went to UAB to get a second opinion. The doctor said we didn’t need it. Everybody prayed for a week and the gap closed in. The good Lord hears you, and that’s all I can say. And it’s been that way all the way through this.”

When Keith’s local doctor at Southern Bone & Joint, Dr. Dean Lolley, heard the report and looked at X-rays, Davis said he was overwhelmed.

“He had a big smile on his face and said, ‘He’s a miracle.’”

Appling sees the miracle too.

“This was not a typical screw-like auger,” he said. “It had all these things in there to help grind up the mulch. There was no doubt in my mind that this kid would never walk again. He was going to have braces, a wheelchair or artificial limbs. When I heard he made a full recovery, I was so shocked.”

The incident earned Keith a nickname from firefighters. One, Gary Purvis, said he was “as tough as a lighter knot.”

“That was the nickname I gave him,” Purvis said. “I was trying to talk to him and keep his mind off things. He was being so calm during the whole situation. I told him he was as tough as a lighter knot. He smiled. Then he asked me what that was.”

He explained it is the impenetrable knot inside a piece of wood.

The father of three, including two teenagers, Purvis said he was affected by the situation he found that day. He wanted to pray with Keith, but resisted asking him for fear the young man might interpret it as evidence of his pending death.

“I found out later he was very active in his church,” Purvis said. “He is just a good kid. So many times we go to things such as this and it doesn’t turn out as good. This kid’s legs were completely wrapped under the auger. It is a miracle and God has a plan for this kid.”

The family would like to thank John and Pam Summerford, Dothan firefighters and paramedics, the staff of second floor East at SAMC, the doctors, members of Ashford United Methodist Church, the staff of CVS on East Main Street, and Ashford High School staff and students, for their love, support and prayers.

Because Keith Jacobs could be anybody’s teenage son or daughter.