JOPLIN, Mo. —
During a mundane school day last October, Kevin Theilen visited Kelsey Norman Elementary School and passed out bicycle helmets to Joplin students.
It’s one of the many child safety initiatives members of the Alliance of Southwest Missouri, through its Safe Kids Coalition of Jasper and Newton Counties, undertakes each year.
One of the about 300 students who received a helmet happened to be Augie Ward.
Nobody with Safe Kids, a program committed to preventing unintentional childhood injuries, could have imagined that helmet would play a significant part in Augie’s life during one of Joplin’s darkest days.
On May 22, Augie and his mother, Natalie Gonzalez, had just returned home from baseball practice when the sirens around them began wailing and, from the west, a tornado roared through a screening rain wall.
Gonzalez instructed Augie to tie on his helmet, thinking of potential debris thrown up by the funnel. When it hit their home, the toilet was ripped from the floor and thrown through the air, striking Augie in the skull.
The bicycle helmet he was wearing -- the helmet given to him as a gift by Safe Kids and the Alliance of Southwest Missouri -- most likely saved the young man’s life, or at the very least prevented massive damage to the skull or brain.
“I saw the tornado warning, I heard the sirens, I looked outside and I saw the dark cloud, and we made the split-second decision to take a blanket, take a pillow and our little puppy” and put them all with Augie inside the tub, overlaying it with a bed mattress, Gonzalez said on May 24 during an ABC news broadcast.
“I told (my son) to put a bicycle helmet on at the last minute because I’d heard on the news if you were worried about falling debris in an earthquake, to put a bicycle helmet on your child.
“And at one point the toilet flew up out of the ground and hit my son in the head and hit me in the back, and the bicycle helmet saved his life.”
Theilen, coordinator for the Safe Kids program as well as a Joplin firefighter, couldn’t believe it when he heard on television about the little boy’s survival wearing a helmet. He immediately picked up the phone to call Jo Sitton, the Alliance’s director of community initiatives.
“He said, ‘I can’t believe it! That’s our helmet!’” Sitton said.
Theilen said it was exciting to see that something given to a child for protection actually ends up saving their lives.
“This is special because you don’t know how many times they’ve crashed on their bikes and the helmet they had on protected them,” he said. “You never hear those kinds of stories.”
It was a nice demonstration of the helmet’s craftsmanship. If the helmet helps a child survive a bulky object flung by 200-plus mph winds, it will cradle the skull during a bike crash on a side street.
“That’s just it,” Sitton said. “If a toilet flying around the room hits you, and the helmet protects your head, well, that says a lot about bike helmet safety.”
Last week, Theilen visited Augie at his school to present him with a brand new safety helmet.
Between 300 and 600 free bicycle helmets are handed out among several Joplin schools each year: Kelsey Norman, West Central, Emerson and Irving have participated in the program.
Theilen also teaches bicycle safety during physical education classes, including how to ride a bike on a road and how to use proper hand signals to warn drivers of their intentions.
Funding for the initiative was received through a 2010 grant from the Missouri Department of Transportation, as part of its “Safe Routes to School Program.”
Safe Kids began with car passenger safety (Be the Back Seat Boss), mostly properly securing and maintaining a child’s car seat.
Aside from biking/pedestrian safety, Safe Kids also educates children about fire safety -- about what they should do during a house fire, how to check batteries in fire alarms, that sort of thing.
“Our goal is to get into every Joplin school,” Sitton said. “We know the items (safety helmets and car seats) we give out are saving lives, but it’s always nice to hear a story like this. It was just exciting for us to get a story back like this that confirms what we do here are saving lives.”
Find out more
For more information on Safe Kids, contact The Alliance of Southwest Missouri at 417-782-9899 or go online at www.theallianceofswmo.org.
Lifestyles
Related Photos
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Kevin Thielen (left), of the Joplin Fire Department, presents a new bike helmet to Kelsey Norman student Augie Ward. Courtesy | Jo Sitton
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Donated bike helmet saves child during tornado
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