Injured teen’s dad: ‘This is a God thing’

When Emma Dewey was told in a hospital psychiatrist’s office Friday that her best friend died in the car accident that left her gravely injured, her response came as a surprise to her father.

“She kept saying ‘It should have been me that died,’ ” Chris Dewey said Friday.

Emma heard the terrible news of her friend Grace Sulak’s death from her mother, Andrea Dewey, who was advised by physicians that the news may be easier to take coming from her.

“She described the accident to Emma and told her how, after they hit the tree, she looked to see if Emma was moving and that she was moaning,” Chris said. “She then told her how she looked in the backseat and saw that Grace wasn’t moving.”

The Deweys were injured May 7 as Andrea drove the girls back to Bluffton from a track and field meet in Columbia.

Andrea, Chris said, remembers the crash. She told Emma that a driver in a white pickup truck was coming up fast behind her on I-26 and, as she tried to move into the other lane, hit her Nissan Rogue from behind.

The Nissan then ran off the roadway and struck a tree.

The truck’s driver remains at large.

Hearing the news

On the morning of the crash, Chris was tied up in a sales meeting. He got a call from Emma that he did not answer. Though it came long before the crash, he regrets not picking up the phone.

“When your kids call you, take the call,” Chris said as his voice broke. “Don’t take another call (instead), because you don’t know if they are going to be alive the next day.”

A few hours later, Chris did answer a call from Emma’s track coach.

“He said ‘Chris, there’s been a horrible accident involving Emma and your ex-wife. It’s bad and people were airlifted,’ ” he said.

He got in his car immediately and sped from Bluffton to Palmetto Health Richland Trauma Center near Columbia with the slim information that only one of the 14-year-old girls in the car was alive.

“I was terrified,” he said. “Complete terror of the unknown.”

Chris said Andrea asked, ‘Is Grace OK?’ several times as she was brought into the emergency room.

He waited until the next day to tell her what had happened.

The road to recovery

Along with some memory loss, Emma has two broken vertebrae, a perforated bowel that contaminated her intestines, bruised lungs, contusions to both sides of her brain and a broken wrist, her father said.

She walked in a back brace for the first time Friday with the help of two nurses.

“The miracle is that she’s a runner and that she came out of this with her legs unscathed,” Chris said.

He described his daughter as a perfectionist whose kindness and outgoing personality played off well with Grace’s shyness.

“She is just a work horse,” he said of his daughter. “But she has a fun, light side to her, and she brought that fun side out of Grace and Faith (Sulak’s twin sister).”

Emma ran varsity cross country in both seventh and eighth grades. On the day of the accident, she ran a one-mile race for the track team, Chris said.

“I think what’s going to be really hard for her is that she and Grace pushed each other (during track season),” he said.

The perfectionist side of his daughter is shining through as she surpasses the goals doctors have set for her, he said.

Since she was brought out of an induced coma Wednesday, Emma’s progress has doctors thinking she will be out of the hospital in a couple of weeks, Chris said. She is being moved from the intensive-care unit to a regular room Saturday.

“She doesn’t even need the rehab they thought she would,” he said.

Her mother, who loves spin classes, is not as fortunate.

Andrea has a shattered knee cap, an ankle that doctors said will likely never have any mobility and a hairline fracture in one of her arms. Doctors told her she can never take a spin class again but will be able to walk and swim.

“I think it’s still like a bad nightmare to her, but she has such strength,” Chris said.

Doctors hope to have Andrea out of the hospital in a week and a half, he said.

In the midst of doctor’s appointments, surgeries and mourning, Chris said the family continues to be grateful for the outpouring of community support.

“The (track) team is going to be here tomorrow,” he said. “The community is just incredible.”

He paused for a moment.

“I’m not a religious person, but I do have faith, and this is a God thing.”

This story was originally published May 13, 2016 at 1:00 PM with the headline "Injured teen’s dad: ‘This is a God thing’."