Skip to content

FOCUS: Surrey man shares story of pain, perseverance and 'finding forgiveness'

5378jz-kevin-brooks-1

Skate or die. Famous words to live by for any anti-authority teenager living in suburbia, and ones that Kevin Brooks took to heart alongside various '90s punk-rock lyrics.

"High school was skateboarding every day, snowboarding whenever I could," said Brooks. "Punk rock just changed my life in so many ways - every show I could go to, I was there crowdsurfing, stagediving, grabbing the mic, singing."

He was your typical skateboarding kid in a middleclass town, but what set him apart was his deserved nickname, "The Creature," coined by his buddies.

Brooks was a fast and loose party animal, usually the guy to make the umpteenth beer run and keep the party going when everyone else was checking out. His hard partying led to a number of close calls where he was lucky to escape - and one where he wasn't so lucky.

THE ACCIDENT

Saturday, June 24, 2000. A 21-year-old Brooks was drinking with friends at a late-night house party.

Around 3 a.m., as things wound down, an intoxicated Brooks got behind the wheel of his 1991 Chevrolet Cavalier Z24, unsure whether or not to call it a night.

He came to a literal crossroads at an intersection: turn right and go home less than five minutes away, or turn left and party some more.

With tunes cranked and beers cracked, he hit the gas and turned the steering wheel left, headed for another boozefuelled rager. But he never made it to the party.

"It was a mellow corner - one I'd whipped around many times before," he recalled.

That corner, in Cloverdale, is the last thing Brooks saw that night. Driving nearly double the 70 km/h speed limit, he lost control and hit the curb, launching his car end over end lengthwise until it stopped in a field on its roof.

Seatbelted in upside-down, a bloody, unconscious Brooks had a collapsed lung, dislocated left shoulder, separated right shoulder and two busted collarbones.

One of his arms was torn to shreds from broken glass.

Sirens wailed throughout the neighbourhood, awakening his mom, Ingrid Kozevnikov. She had a premonition those emergency response teams were for her son.

"When I heard all the sirens, I knew it was Kevin," she said. "It was just a sense I had."

Knowing Brooks and his friends had gotten into accidents previously, she knew he was prone to tempting fate, but never thought he would get into a wreck of that magnitude.

"In my heart it's one thing, but in my head it's another thing. I wasn't so shocked by it, but I was shocked at the severity and the devastation of the crash."

Firefighters spent more than an hour removing him with the Jaws of Life - something of which Brooks has no memory. It wasn't until after an induced coma and transfers between various intensive care units that he was able to communicate with his family and friends.

He tried getting up. He tried moving his legs. He tried to, as he put it, just wiggle his toes. Nothing worked.

Unable to move the lower half of his body, he asked what happened. His mom told him he had fractured his C6 and C7 vertebrae where his neck and back meet, damaging his spinal cord. He was paralyzed from the chest down.

"Your life flashes before your eyes," said Brooks. "Skateboarding, snowboarding, hockey, walking, sex, my job, driving - you go through every single thing that you're not going to be able to do. It just feels like your world has completely ended."

But that hopeless feeling after learning he'd never walk again paled in comparison to the next thing his mom told him.

Brendon Beuk, a childhood friend, was in the car with him. Beuk sustained a serious head injury. He didn't survive.

"When I found out about Brendon, that just hit so much harder," said Brooks, exhaling deeply.

While Brooks and Beuk had known each other from hockey as kids, they went to different high schools and drifted apart socially. Beuk dated Brooks' oldest sister Allison, but they had split some time before the accident.

It caught everyone off guard that Beuk was in the passenger's seat.

"Kevin had quit playing hockey a few years prior to that, and after Allison and Brendon had broken up, Kevin and Brendon just never saw each other," said Kozevnikov. "We were shocked that it was Brendon who was in the car that night. Absolutely shocked."

"I never saw that one coming," said Brooks, his voice breaking. "There's nothing that could've prepared me for it."

Kevin Brooks focus

THE FORGIVENESS

The odds of Brooks regaining his health were not good. He was given a 20-to-30-per-cent chance to live, but even as he got better, at times, he had a bleak outlook on life after the accident. It was hard to keep his spirits up, knowing his friend had died in the same car and he himself would never walk again.

Reluctantly, he did physiotherapy at the GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre in Vancouver, and after months of hard work, his condition improved enough to make it home for Christmas.

"We're resilient. There's a fight inside us to survive," said Brooks looking back on that time.

But while his body had been repaired physically, it took longer for his emotional scars to heal.

During Brooks' recovery, Beuk's parents showed compassion and asked Brooks' parents how he was doing. At Beuk's funeral, while Brooks was clinging to life, they asked the attendees to pray for him.

They left their phone number with Brooks' family, asking for him to call. He waited weeks before dialling that number and trembled as he punched in the digits. When Beuk's mom answered, Brooks identified himself and they burst into tears.

The way Beuk's parents saw it, both Brendon and Brooks made the choice to get behind the wheel that night.

"'He could've been driving you, it could've been reversed,'" Brooks recalled Beuk's parents saying. "I'm still trying to wrap my head around that."

As a result of the crash, Brooks was charged with dangerous driving and impaired driving causing death. He pleaded guilty and waited 18 months before he got in front of a judge.

"My future, it was really in his hands," he said. "The judge said he saw a young man sitting in a wheelchair.

"As the judge said, I'd already given myself a life sentence."

Before his sentencing, the courts reached out to Beuk's family to see if they wanted to press charges. They wanted nothing.

"They said I'd been through enough. They kept me out of jail and gave me a second chance. I owe so much gratitude. It allowed me to forgive myself."

THE MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKING

"I remember just being outside one day thinking, I've got to go tell this story," Brooks said. "I wasn't even out of rehab yet and I was terrified of public speaking."

He started volunteering in his community, and through a series of fortuitous meetings with wheelchairbound Paralympian Rick Hansen and a former classmate's younger brother - who coincidentally was struck and injured by a drunk driver in the same intersection of Brooks' - he ended up speaking to kids about his accident.

That led to a partnership with ICBC's Road Safety speaking program for more than 10 years strong. Brooks, now 35, rolls into classrooms across North America in his wheelchair - decked out in punk rock stickers from his favourite bands, including Pennywise, Rancid and Agent Orange - and warns teenagers not to make the same mistake he did.

"They see me as a peer - they don't see me as a teacher or a parent or an authority figure," said Brooks, who's still a teenager at heart. "It's like the opposite of a Catch-22. If I stay into all that young stuff, it makes it more relevant to the kids."

He reminds students to "just wiggle your toes," referencing his attempt when he came to in hospital. That mantra influenced one girl in Summerland to get the words tattooed across her feet. Then another. Then Brooks had JWYT inked across his knuckles, and his mom and youngest sister each had the "just wiggle your toes" message tattooed on their feet.

"She (the girl in Summerland) sent me the picture of it and I was like, 'Whoa!'" he recalled. "That was beyond everything I ever imagined."

Kevin Brooks focus

To date, Brooks has presented at more than 1,500 schools. His presentation touches on themes of bullying, self-harm and suicide, the latter one stemming from the death of a friend named Jordan, which Brooks found out about right before a presentation.

"There was like 500 kids, and that presentation is emotional on the best of days," he said. "I start bawling, the whole school's looking at me, I haven't even started talking. I had to address what was going on and it just opened up a whole new door of emails."

Not a day goes by that Brooks doesn't receive emails (kevinbrooks@shaw. ca), tweets (@JustWiggleYourToes) and Facebook messages (Facebook. com/JustWiggleYourToes) from kids who have been inspired by his presentation or remembered his warning against drinking and driving.

"A girl saw me in Ontario and she went home and told her little brother," he said. "Years later, her little brother is 16, he's out partying with his friends and they're going to get in a car. He remembers his sister telling him about my presentation, so he doesn't get in the car. They leave, they crash, one guy gets seriously hurt, the other guy dies.

"The sister's like, 'I don't know for sure, but you probably saved my little brother's life.'"

A few key points really hit home with the youth, namely the photos of his totalled Cavalier - which solicit gasps throughout every audience he's presented to - and the fact his youngest sister, Hayley, was only five at the time.

"Because she was so young, that's just always been something that just got everybody," said Brooks. "It just kicks everyone's butt and makes them cry at the end. And then her being a teenager and growing up while I'm doing this stuff, being the same age as the kids that I'm presenting to, she's just a huge part of the story."

At every presentation, he keeps four empty chairs up at the front in memory of Beuk, Jordan and two other friends who passed away. Those friends are Chris Whitmee, who was killed in the bathroom of a Cloverdale bar - his murder is still unsolved - and Gord Couling, one of the first people Brooks met from ICBC, who died of cancer last year.

"All these talks this year are dedicated in a big way to my buddy Gord," said Brooks.

THE FUTURE

Brooks calls his story "a universal message of pain, struggle, perseverance and finding forgiveness and happiness in life." He still thinks of the accident regularly and how it could have been prevented, but he recognizes the importance of his work with youth.

"If I had one wish, it would just be that no one was with me," he said of the crash. "I think I'd still end up in the same situation I'm in right now, but the only really true sad part of the story is the fact that Brendon was there.

"I know what happened. I know it every day when I wake up and there's a wheelchair beside me. But I'm here, so I have to do something with it."

Kevin Brooks focus