A horrible accident and a shattered family
ASHBURN, Virginia: The hospital room was still dark when the father woke to the now familiar sound of his son gasping for air.
“What’s up, buddy?” Faran Kaplan said, reaching towards the bed where the 17-year-old was snorting through a tracheostomy tube. Wires snaked from Benjamin Kaplan’s emaciated frame. Atop his half-shaven head sat a crown of silver stitches: A reminder of the car crash that had cost them so much.
As dawn broke and nurses at Inova Fairfax Hospital arrived on a fall morning to check the tubes and wires, Benjamin - his right eye half open, his left eye nearly shut - waved a broken right arm.
“You want to write?” Faran asked, putting a whiteboard on his son’s stomach and a marker in his hand.
In the beginning, after a tracheostomy left him unable to speak, the high school senior’s writing had been incomprehensible. But now, a dozen surgeries later, his hands were smeared with black ink, and he could communicate well enough to argue with his father like a normal teenager.
But he wasn’t a normal teenager. Not since the accident. Perhaps never again.
Last year, 37,461 people died in automobile accidents across America, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That toll - higher than the number of people killed by gun violence - is now getting worse. After falling for a decade, traffic fatalities in the United States have risen by 14 per cent over the past two years.
For the more than two million people injured in crashes each year, surviving doesn’t always guarantee recovery.
“Help me,” Benjamin wrote in shaky letters.
“I am trying to help you,” his father replied, taking off his Baltimore Orioles hat and rubbing his face.
For 19 days - ever since he’d seen the rescue helicopters over their house in Ashburn, Virginia, on Sept 8, ever since his worried calls to his wife, Erin, had gone unanswered Faran Kaplan had been trying to care for his family without her.
For 19 nights he’d slept at one of the bedsides of the three children paramedics had pulled from the wreckage. With the help of neighbours and friends, he’d brought home his two badly injured daughters, Emma, 13, and Sophia, 11, and begun to think about the future.
But here, in Room 806, was a reminder of how hard that future would be.
“What are we doing?” Benjamin wrote.
“We are trying to get healthy,” replied Faran, a 40-year-old data centre engineer, as patiently as he could.
And then, as if to defy his father, Benjamin began tugging at the tube in his stomach and the IV in his arm and the catheter in his bladder and the oxygen monitor attached to his toe.
“Stop that,” Faran said, helping the nurses hold down his son’s hands.
But the teen’s hands wouldn’t stay still. They soon found the black marker and the whiteboard, where he scrawled the question his father prayed he’d stop asking.
“Where is my goddamn mum?”
Their family was so closely knit they called themselves The Kaplan five, and she was its core: a 39-year-old stay-at-home mum who woke at six each morning to make coffee, to-do lists and sugar-free school lunches for her kids. She took Sophia to gymnastics, and Emma to see Taylor Swift, and Benjamin to learn to drive. And on the weekends, instead of slowing down, she took the family on miles-long hikes she dubbed “Mum’s death marches.”
So when her son had to work on a Friday evening, Erin Kaplan offered to drive him.
The kids had just started back to school, with Emma and Sophia at Brambleton Middle and Benjamin entering his senior year at Briar Woods High School. He’d just passed the test for his learner’s permit and started a part-time job making sandwiches at Wegmans, a few miles from home.
Erin hustled her children into the back seat of an Audi station wagon and set off for the grocery store. Her mother, Jeanne Lester, visiting from Ellicott City, Maryland, where Erin had grown up, sat next to her.
They’d barely driven a mile on Evergreen Mills Road when there was a flash of red. A bus that had been converted into a food truck and painted crimson blew through a stop sign and Tboned the station wagon.
Tony Dane, the owner of Dane’s Great American Hamburger food truck, would later tell investigators that his vehicle’s brakes failed, according to a search warrant affidavit. Dane said he manoeuvred around a school bus and thought about driving the food truck into a ditch. But his 16-year-old son and one of his son’s friends were on board and weren’t wearing seat belts. All three walked away from the crash, which remains under investigation by the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office.
When rescue workers arrived, they found Erin’s Audi pinned against a guard rail with the 10ton food truck on top of it. They didn’t expect anyone inside to be alive. It took three hours for them to saw through the twisted metal to extricate all five people from the car.
Faran was golfing a few miles away when he noticed the helicopters in the evening sky. He called and texted Erin but there was no answer. Then he tried his kids, to no avail. When he called Wegmans and was told Benjamin hadn’t shown up for work, his stomach dropped.
He drove towards the drone of the helicopters until he reached a roadblock, where a sheriff’s deputy confirmed his fears.
For two hours, Faran waited at the hospital, where he was told five helicopters would bring his family members. Only four arrived. Sophia, despite her crushed pelvis and broken limbs, gave her dad a thumb’s up as her
For the more than two million people injured in crashes each year, surviving doesn’t always guarantee recovery.
gurney was wheeled into the hospital. Emma, with two broken ankles and a broken wrist, was crying. Benjamin was screaming in pain. And finally came Erin’s mother, whose injuries were the least severe.
When a fifth gurney never appeared, Faran realised that his wife, who loved tulips and braiding her daughters’ hair and drinking rose on their porch in the evening, was dead.
And now, 19 days later inside Room 806, his son was again demanding to know where she was.
“You know where she’s at. We don’t have to talk about this today, do we?” Faran said. “You were in a car accident. Your sisters are OK.”
He leaned in to kiss his son, whose face was contorted in a soundless scream, only to accidentally knock the oxygen tube from Benjamin’s nose.
“I’m sorry, Benny,” Faran said as a nurse arrived to re-insert the tube. “You know I’ll be here for you forever. Did that hurt? Can you breathe?” It was as if the accident had taken them back 15 years. Faran clipped and cleaned his son’s fingernails, still caked with dirt from the crash. Inside his son’s ears he found tiny shards of glass.
Benjamin would sleep for a few minutes, then sit up, restless and agitated. One moment, he asked for a blanket. The next, he threw his sheets off the bed.
“I wanna go home,” he wrote.
“Ben, you have to get better first,” Faran said.
Before the accident, he had worked long hours to provide for his family while his wife took care of the kids. Now, somehow, he would have to do both. — WP-Bloomberg