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Iowan survives accident, now plans to focus on family
By JARED STRONG
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
The midsummer sun rose over green, rolling hills south of Granger. Cyclist Collier Schofield had passed the halfway point on his normal training route along a little-traveled rural Dallas County road. He was racing back to his West Des Moines home.
This would be his pinnacle year, his last as a competitive cyclist. Schofield, 42, had trained up to five hours a day - diet, ride and research - and now sped toward the Hy-Vee Triathlon, which was just three days away. A national amateur championship race in Pennsylvania would complete the journey, which began with a tragedy eight years earlier - and would end minutes later with another.
Schofield and a fellow cyclist were on a flat stretch of Alice's Road, a little more than a mile north of Iowa Highway 44 near Grimes.
It was just after 6 a.m. on June 12 when a sport utility vehicle struck them from behind. Schofield was thrown 100 feet; his partner, 40 feet. The impact left a pair of dents on the vehicle, one over each headlight.
Schofield was found unconscious in a ditch. There was a lot of blood.
A passer-by would bring him back to life, the way cycling had eight years ago, after Schofield lost Carol, his 5-year-old daughter.
Cycling heals pain
Carol was scheduled for heart surgery a few weeks before her first day of kindergarten in 1999.
Her life had been a battle since birth. She was born with her major arteries reversed. Oxygen-rich blood pumped only between her heart and lungs; a small hole in Carol's heart allowed some of the blood to circulate to the rest of her body. Doctors had enlarged the hole as a temporary fix and hoped to switch the arteries. They hadn't planned on the infection. She died four days later.
Schofield, angry and full of grief, hopped on his bike in a desperate attempt to turn a hobby into therapy. The open road was where he vented his frustration. It seemed to work.
Before long, cycling consumed him, along with the time he had spent with his wife, Chris, and their other daughter, Maddison, now 13. They later adopted two more children.
Schofield had abandoned cycling after he married Chris. He had gained about 100 pounds but pedaled away about 40 in the first three months after Carol died. He started to win races. He was a state champion of Nebraska in 2000. In 2001, he won in Altoona.
Schofield stretched at 4:15 a.m. and was on the road by 7 a.m. At night, after eight hours in the Wittern Group's information technology department, he researched his cycling opponents. He checked their race times and incorporated parts of their training into his. He even cycled during family vacations.
"He was very obsessed with what he could do better to be faster, instead of sitting down and really focusing on the big picture," Chris Schofield said. "It was more of an individual sport than what we used to do as a family."
J.J. Bailey saw Schofield's commitment to the sport. It's the reason he lured Schofield to his local coaching company, Zoom Performance.
"When I started talking to him, I found out he was pretty serious, even though he was married with kids," Bailey said. "I loved to get someone with his kind of raw talent."
With Bailey's guidance, Schofield became one of the top time-trial racers in Iowa.
"He really wanted to step up his game leading into the national time trials championship this year" in Pennsylvania, Bailey said. "He would have finished for sure in the top 10. If he had a really good race, top five.
"The Hy-Vee Triathlon would have been the last really big, all-out test."
Another tragedy
Schofield occasionally heard about cyclists who got hurt. The stories rolled off him. Sure, there were accidents - he had already replaced six helmets - but it was mostly minor stuff. He once crashed in front of his home while waving at a neighbor.
"Every day he was riding, I always worried about something happening," Chris Schofield said. "He always assured me he was an excellent, excellent and cautious rider."
Chris was in bed with her children when the telephone broke the silence on the morning of June 12. Her husband was late, but she had figured he stopped for a cup of coffee after his ride.
"I felt I was reliving my daughter's death," she recalled.
Gerald Johnson was the first to identify Schofield in Iowa Methodist Medical Center's intensive care unit. Johnson, 38, had been Schofield's riding partner for about five years.
The route to Granger was a good way to avoid traffic. But that morning, Johnson was tired.
"I reached over, turned my alarm clock off and went back to bed," he said. "It was one of the only mornings I can remember that we didn't ride together."
A friend told Johnson about the crash. No one at the hospital had called Chris Schofield because her husband rode without identification.
"He looked like he could die at any second," Johnson recalled. "He was awake, but his eyes were rolled into the back of his head. He kept saying, 'I hurt so bad,' except he would scream it."
The force of the collision knocked the wedding ring off Schofield's hand. He lost two-thirds of his blood, mainly the result of a large cut on his back. Several vertebrae were broken. His pelvis was shattered and ribs were cracked. A ventilator kept him alive, and doctors induced a coma.
Johnson was there six days before his friend came to.
More than two months later, Iowa State Patrol investigators have made public few details of their investigation. Schofield can't help - he doesn't remember. But he has been told this:
- He and Sergey Motorny, 26, of Des Moines had slowed to less than 20 mph just before they were hit.
- The driver, Theodore Jenkins, 52, had left a job with the Dallas County roads department less than a year earlier because of an undisclosed disability.
- Jenkins told investigators that he didn't see the riders.
- Stew Wren found Schofield in the ditch.
Wren, a 43-year-old plumber from Dallas Center, was on his way to do some work at a Johnston elementary school.
"I saw a guy lying in the road, so I got out of the truck, and, as I started walking towards him, I saw two bikes," Wren said.
It was Motorny, who had suffered a broken back. Wren found Schofield in the ditch. He was in worse shape.
"I could see bone coming through the back of his Spandex. His head was bleeding, and he wasn't moving."
Wren leaned close to Schofield and yelled, hoping it would rouse him from unconsciousness.
"When he opened his eyes, they were fogged over. It looked like he was done for."
A second chance
Metal rods secure two bones in Schofield's arm and half of his back. A halo is screwed into his skull to keep his neck in place.
"It's a miracle, as far as I'm concerned, that both of them made it," Chris Schofield said.
Her husband spent a month in the hospital; Motorny continues to heal at home.
Last week, they took a walk together for the first time since the crash and compared doctors' notes. There will be more surgeries. There may also be criminal charges against the man who hit them.
Jenkins has refused to comment publicly on the accident. His ex-wife said he had surgery to correct a vision problem before the crash.
Jenkins has two vision-related restrictions on his driver's license, a crash report shows: corrective lenses and a left outside mirror, which is required when vision in a driver's left eye is less than 20/100.
Regardless of the legal outcome, Schofield feels fortunate to be alive. He doubts he'll ever cycle competitively again, but he describes the near-death experience and long recovery as a blessing in disguise.
"I struggle to say that this has been tough. I'm so friggin' lucky to get a second chance," he said. "All that time I took away from my wife and kids, I get a second chance to make up for it."
Reporter Jared Strong can be reached at (515) 284-8075 or jstrong@dmreg.com
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Source: http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070818/NEWS/708180342/-1/BUSINESS04
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