BACK FROM THE DEAD

In the wee hours of Jan. 18, the fates conspired against Murray Brown.

Rain was pouring that frigid night in Las Vegas, where the Costa Mesa native had just relocated. Brown was driving home from a pool game after socializing over a few drinks. The slick roads were dangerous even for the most sober of drivers.

A stray shopping cart had wandered into Brown’s path. He swerved to miss it and skidded off the street. His Jeep, made for climbing rugged terrain, plowed right over an embankment that would have rebuffed lighter vehicles. The flood-control channel below--normally dry as the Nevada desert--had been transformed into a gushing river.

Brown’s Jeep rolled twice, landing upside down. He was knocked unconscious, his body submerged in freezing water.

From that point on, the fates smiled on Murray Brown.

In a residential neighborhood at 12:30 on a rainy morning, not many people were out and about. But Sandra Torres and Edna DeJohnette happened to drive by Brown’s belly-up Jeep just seconds after it had tumbled into the channel.

“We were stopped at a traffic light,” Torres recalled. “I noticed a shopping cart on the other side of the street, which made me look to the right. That’s when I saw wheels sticking out of the ditch; they were still turning.”

The two young women called 911 from a nearby convenience store. Within minutes, seven firefighters, five police officers and three paramedics had arrived on the scene. Torres and DeJohnette pitched in.

Battling ice-cold water as torrential as a stormy sea, rescue workers freed Brown from his vehicle--then wrestled to bring him ashore. At one harrowing moment, Brown’s limp body slipped through the rope, and Las Vegas Fire Department Capt. Perry Hortt dove under to retrieve him.

“I wrapped my legs around him and hung on to the rope,” Hortt said. “The water was moving so fast that I thought we might be swept away.”

It wasn’t until Brown had been whisked away by the ambulance that his rescuers stopped to wonder whether the man for whom they had risked their lives could possibly survive.

“We started thinking, boy, he had to have been under water for at least 20 minutes,” Hortt said. “The time factor didn’t even enter into our thoughts before--we were so focused on just getting him out. But once the rescue was over, we felt pretty down. We didn’t think he was going to make it.”

When Brown arrived at the hospital, his body temperature had dropped below 88 degrees--which is, in most cases, the point of no return for a victim suffering both hypothermia and injuries. He had no signs of neurological activity; he was not breathing; his heartbeat was slow and irregular.

But Brown had landed at University Medical Center, home to a one-of-a-kind, blood-warming machine. And so his lucky streak persisted.

After attempting the usual methods of resuscitating a hypothermia victim who has injuries--irrigating his abdominal cavity with warm water, wrapping him in electric blankets--doctors resorted to the new device. Unwittingly, Brown became a pioneer in medicine; the machine had been tested successfully on laboratory animals but never on a human.

Its creator, trauma specialist Larry Gentilello, said Brown was virtually dead when the doctor put his machine into action. “Statistically, he had no chance,” said Gentilello, who is a staff physician at University Medical Center. “His temperature declined three degrees while he was in the emergency room; the conventional treatments had no impact whatsoever.

“Within about 20 minutes of starting the new re-warming method, he began to breathe, his heart function normalized, he began to reach for his tubes and make purposeful movements. His temperature rose one degree every 10 minutes.”

Brown lay unconscious for the following week. Although tests indicated that he had not suffered a serious head injury, doctors were unable to assess brain damage.

Then he drifted awake--his mischievous personality intact.

Today, Brown remembers nothing of his car accident, nothing of the rescue workers’ desperate struggle to deliver him from death, nothing of the ambulance or the electric blankets or the blood-warming machine or the six days in a coma.

“I was kind of out of it that night. In fact, I was kind of dead that night,” he said.

Did he have a near-death experience? Float outside his body? Go through a tunnel? See a bright light? Anything of that nature?

“No. Sorry,” Brown said in mock apology. “I talked to a lot of people in the hospital who did have near-death experiences, but I didn’t. Somehow I got robbed of that--I think because I was never meant to die.”

Last week, after spending a month in the Las Vegas hospital, Brown returned to the Costa Mesa house he grew up in. He plans to complete his recuperation under the loving care of his family.

And loving, it is. Brown’s parents stayed by the side of their youngest child and only son throughout his hospitalization, and his five sisters frequently visited from California.

“My first memory after waking up is of my parents being there,” Brown said. “My family was there constantly. I wouldn’t have made it without them.”

Except for some residual numbness in his fingers due to frostbite, Brown has fully--and miraculously, some say--recovered from his ordeal. Only three weeks before his release, doctors feared the possibility of brain damage.

Yet here was this friendly young man, less than 24 hours out of the hospital, popping one-liners and playfully sparring with family members as if nothing much had happened.

When it was pointed out that his adoring father seemed to be waiting on him hand and foot (“Do you want a soda, son? Would you like ice in that soda?”), Brown teasingly shushed the suggestion: “Don’t tell him--he might stop.”

“I’m so damned glad to have him back, I’ll do anything for him,” said his father, Richard Brown.

“Dad figures that when he’s old, he’ll want me around to bring him sodas,” the younger Brown quipped.

Brown is the kind of person you like right off the bat. He is naturally amiable, effortlessly confident, disarmingly candid. His self-styled goofiness makes him seem younger than his 27 years.

“It still doesn’t feel real to me. Did I actually go through that?” Brown marveled.

(Blood tests showed that Brown had been drinking before the accident: Police reported his blood-alcohol level above the legal limit, but the hospital reading was under the limit. No charges were filed.)

Brown’s sister, Janine, joined in. “We got the call at about 2:30 a.m., and we took a 6 a.m. flight out,” she said of that heartbreaking morning. “We anticipated the worst. We were afraid that even if he lived he would be a, um, a . . . . “

“Tomato,” Murray Brown completed her sentence.

“We talked with Mom and Dad about how far we wanted to go with this--with trying to keep Murray alive--if he had brain damage,” she continued.

And if he did? Would Brown want to live if his mental abilities had been impaired?

“I’ve got an attitude that if these hands don’t come back, I don’t want to be here,” he answered. “So, no, if I were handicapped worse than I already am, it would require quite a bit of adjustment for me to be on Earth.”

His hands ? All that he could have lost--his life or his intellect or his mobility--and nerve damage to his hands is enough to make him question his will to survive?

“I know it seems minor, but this is all I have,” he said, holding up his hands. “At present, I would not be able to practice my profession. I haven’t gone to school so that I could use my brain predominately to make money. I’ve always taken great pride in what I’ve built--my hands are how I do that.”

In fact, he had moved to Las Vegas a few months ago earlier to look for a job installing ceramic tile.

“A friend of mine who lives in Las Vegas called and said the housing industry there was really expanding,” Brown explained. “He said he knew of some work for me, so I decided to go for it.”

Suddenly, Brown turned sanguine. “I’ll beat it--I know I will,” he said, squeezing the therapeutic rubber ball intended to help strengthen his fingers.

“I still have my charm.” He took his visitor’s hand and kissed it: “See? I haven’t lost my touch with women.”

“There are a lot of psychological difficulties in coping with a near-death experience,” Dr. Gentilello said.

“Obviously, Murray is extremely lucky to come out of this without brain damage. But for a person who almost died, it doesn’t make much sense to him when people say he’s lucky because he would rather have not had the experience at all,” the doctor said.

However, Brown eventually “will learn to adjust to whatever disability he is left with,” he said. “He is still going through a grieving process, but soon he will put things into perspective. It helps that he has such a supportive family--a truly wonderful family.”

Mention the name Murray Brown to anyone who had something to do with his rescue or recovery, and praise for his family follows.

It’s a family that telephoned Sandra Torres and Edna DeJohnette every day that Brown was in the hospital to update them on his progress. “One of his sisters kept asking us to come to the hospital and meet them,” Torres said.

“When I finally met Murray’s father, the first thing he said to me was, ‘What in the devil were you two girls doing out on a night like that?’--as if he were my father,” she laughed.

The Browns became famous around University Medical Center for their congeniality and their devotion to one another. For that matter, the Browns became famous throughout the city of Las Vegas.

A few factors combined to make Murray Brown both a local media event and a local hero: his daring rescue captured by a television cameraman; the never-before-used blood-warming machine that revived him; his amazing rally.

“Sure, we wouldn’t have covered the story as closely as we did if we hadn’t gotten this exclusive footage,” admitted Eric Hulnick, executive producer of News 3 at KVBC, the NBC-affiliate station in Las Vegas. “We did not pass up any legitimate chance to use that video--we’ve aired it dozens of times, and it’s still compelling.”

Cameraman Jeff Lonetree, a 22-year-old greenhorn who had started at KVBC just three days before, heard about an overturned Jeep on the police radio and went to check it out--mainly to get in some practice. After all, the accident was only four blocks from the station, so he figured that little effort would be wasted if the story proved too mundane for broadcast.

But rather than a routine smashup, the cub reporter found himself shooting rescue workers braving angry waters to save a half-drowned man. The film appeared that night on “NBC News” with Tom Brokaw, and later on “The Today Show” and “Good Morning America.”

That Brown became the first hypothermia victim to be resurrected by Gentilello’s new machine heightened media interest. The device recirculates the patient’s own blood on a continuous basis--draining it from an artery, heating it to 101 degrees, then pumping it back into the body through a vein.

“Over 90% of hypothermia that we see is due to shock from severe injury rather than exposure to a cold environment,” Gentilello said. “In a case where the hypothermia is due only to environmental causes, a cardiac-bypass machine is very effective in warming the victim. But that method has one drawback--it requires the administration of an anticoagulant; otherwise, the blood would clot up the bypass machine.

“So a cardiac-bypass machine is not an option for someone who has suffered injuries--the anticoagulant would cause him to bleed to death. Murray had head cuts and abdominal injuries; there was no viable solution except for the blood-warming machine.”

Speed is another advantage of the new devise--officially named a Continuous Arterio-Venous Rewarming machine, or a CAVR for short. “The conventional techniques used on an accident victim take a very long time--at least 12 hours--in restoring the body to its normal temperature,” Gentilello explained. “With the CAVR, we were able to re-warm Murray in a little over an hour.”

And thus Murray Brown could go home again.

For most Americans, Las Vegas is that place with the gaudy strip of casinos where people go to play blackjack and witness sometimes second-rate entertainment. But the Browns came to know a completely different side of the city, a side far removed from the flashing neon signs. “Everybody was so nice to us, so caring,” Richard Brown said. “It was like spending a month in a small town, where people look out for one another.”

“To lose something, and then to get it back, makes it even more precious,” said the elder Brown, his arm draped around his son. “This experience has made me wish that I had spent more time with my kids when they were growing up. If I could do it over again, I would work less, indulge in fewer luxuries--so that I could stay at home more.”

Yes, Murray is the baby of the family, and the only boy, but his mother shrugged off any hint that he might be singled out as extra-special. “We would react the same way if this had happened to any of our children,” Yvette Brown said, dabbing her eyes. “We just love them all so much.”

They still are in awe of this particular child’s miraculous return. “It’s as if it were all orchestrated,” Richard Brown said. “Right down the line, like clockwork, click, click, click: the girls saw the car, the medics got there, the hospital was only a mile away, the blood-warming machine was at the hospital.

“Any one of a dozen things could have changed just a hair--those two girls could had lingered over another cup of coffee--and Murray wouldn’t be here.”

What luck, an outsider might think, that Murray Brown’s accident occurred near the only hospital in the world with the blood-warming machine so crucial to saving his life.

But Brown--ever realistic, ever straight-talking--sees the situation a little differently: “Well, if I’d had the accident in Costa Mesa , my Jeep wouldn’t have crashed into a ditch full of freezing water.”

You can’t argue with logic.