Benefield: Severely injured 16-year-old Smith has a #KellenStrong support system
Jacque Eischens plays the moment over in her head even as she tries to forget.
It was nearly 1 a.m. She was at the front door of one of her dearest friends, knocking with increasing urgency, trying to get Shannon Smith to wake up.
“When she opened the door, I just completely froze for a couple of seconds. It completely hit me: What do I say right now?” she said.
When the words came, they sounded something like this: “I said, ‘Shannon, Kellen was in an accident. We need to go to the hospital.'”
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When Mike Smith's phone rang at 1 a.m., he knew something was wrong.
Smith, principal at Upper Lake Middle School who also serves as the football and girls' basketball coach for the high school, had been up late after attending an Upper Lake Unified School District board meeting. He thinks he dropped off around 12:15 a.m.
“I was just hitting deep sleep and my phone rang and it was Shannon,” he said. “It was right at 1 a.m. and I was like, ‘This isn't good.'”
Shannon and Mike Smith's son, Kellen, was grievously injured after losing control of his 2008 Honda Civic. Kellen, 16, was northbound on Lakeshore Boulevard in Clear Lake just before midnight Aug. 14 when he hit a wooden fence. His two passengers, Desmond Mueller, 16, and a 14-year-old girl were uninjured. But Kellen Smith suffered a skull fracture and a traumatic brain injury.
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“I didn't know exactly what happened,” Mueller, a senior wide receiver and free safety for the Cougars, said of the crash. “At first, I definitely didn't comprehend what was going on.”
Mueller suffered a small cut on his face, but was otherwise OK. But it became immediately clear that Kellen Smith was not.
“His head was sideways,” he said. There was blood and glass and pieces of the car everywhere. The air bags had not deployed, he said.
The CHP report found Kellen Smith had been driving at an unknown rate of speed and while negotiating a left curve in the roadway, made an unsafe turning movement and lost control. They had not been drinking, Mueller said.
“No,” he said. “I'm against that stuff.”
Searching for information that night, Mike Smith asked the same question.
“I called Desmond after I got out of Ukiah, ‘Desmond, what the heck happened?'” he said. “‘Were you guys drinking?' He said, ‘No, I swear to God we weren't.'”
Toxicology reports came back clean, Mike Smith said.
But it was illegal for Kellen Smith to be driving after 11 p.m. and with two underage passengers. The chance of a first-year driver getting into an accident skyrocket when passengers and nighttime are factored in, according to a 2017 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study.
When he got his bearings after the crash, Mueller realized that his friend and teammate was in bad shape.
“I held his head straight,” he said. “He was breathing on his own … very loud breathing, like snoring almost.”
They called 911.
Kellen Smith was taken by helicopter to the Kaiser Vacaville Hospital Trauma Center. Within two hours, he was in surgery to remove a piece of his skull in order to reduce brain swelling.
When the surgeon emerged in the early morning hours of Aug. 15 and briefed Shannon and Mike, he was not gentle.
“He was blunt, tough,” Mike Smith remembered. “He did not sugarcoat anything in that moment. He said ‘Kellen has had a very, very serious brain injury and there will be brain damage. We don't know how much, but it is serious.'”
Mike Smith doesn't remember what else was said at that moment, but he knows what was running through his mind.
“Are we going to have to make decisions? Is he going to live? We didn't verbalize it but it's what we were thinking,” he said.
“We are not super religious people, but when you are in that position, when you are not sure if your child is going to live or die, you pray,” Shannon said.
But despite the desperation of the moment, both Shannon and Mike Smith remember hospital support staff telling them this: Their son is young and in perhaps the best shape of his life. Just hours before the car accident, Smith was working out with the Upper Lake varsity football team where he is backup quarterback.
What made him a high school athlete might be the key to what brings him back.
Shocking start to season
“It was the second day of pads (practice) when it happened,” said Vince Moran, who has taken over full time coaching duties for Smith since the accident.
The community around Upper Lake and Lakeport is small and tight. So in the hours after the accident that night, texts were flying but details were scant. Moran, whose son Ray starts at quarterback ahead of Kellen, heard about the accident almost immediately but facts were hard to come by.
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