Laborers of Love : Workers Remodel Home to Accommodate Paralyzed Teen-Ager

People do amazing things for David Lupash.

It’s been that way since the teen-ager dove into a Long Beach sandbar almost three years ago, nearly severed his spine and bobbed to the ocean surface paralyzed.

While he was still in the hospital, 100 Seal Beach swim team pals canvassed neighborhoods collecting contributions for his medical bills. Sunday school classmates held prayer vigils. Community swim-a-thons netted more donations. And the Seal Beach Junior Women’s Club still does fund-raising.

Now a team of construction workers has given him an $80,000 birthday present. Free of charge, they have built a two-story, 1,080-square-foot wing to the Lupash family ahome in Westminster that will accommodate David’s wheelchair and special equipment.

David, a functional quadriplegic, moved in Saturday, his 16th birthday.

“I’ve just fallen in love with the kid,” says Ron Sehnert, a Long Beach contractor and the driving force behind the construction. “You just don’t meet people with his incredible attitude.”

“He’s quite a young man,” adds Bob Oppermann, owner of a Whittier elevator company whose employees worked after hours reconditioning a teak wheelchair lift for David’s new digs. “I don’t mind giving my time.”

At 13, David was a promising swimmer and junior lifeguard--a budding violinist fluent in Romanian, which his family speaks at home, who was earning straight A’s at McAuliffe Middle School in Los Alamitos.

His family lives at the edge of Westminster, closer to the heart of Seal Beach, a town still small enough that news of the accident galvanized the community within a week.

On a bright July afternoon in 1988, David and his twin, Daniel, performed in a junior lifeguard competition at the Long Beach shore. During his turn in a relay, David ran into the surf and plunged into a wave without first placing his hands together over his head in a diving position.

His forehead slammed into a sandbar, snapping his fourth vertebra. He has been paralyzed since. After numerous hospitalizations and a daily rigor of physical therapy, the brown-haired teen-ager is what is called an incomplete quadriplegic, meaning he has patches of sensation all over his body and limited movement, but not enough for any practical use.

A switch-operated motorized wheelchair carries him around the Lupash kitchen-family room, which has become his bedroom. There are no downstairs bedrooms in the two-story tract house and, until now, it was the only room with enough space for his special bed, therapy equipment and computer.

Every morning David works with a therapist, stretching his arms and legs. He is fed, groomed and lifted into his wheelchair, and he then begins his schoolwork. With a home teacher he studies subjects like honors English and geometry and remains at the same 10th-grade level as his brother, a Los Alamitos High School student. David hopes to enroll at Los Alamitos next year.

In a few years, he may end up at USC, where he is a candidate for the Swim With Mike scholarship for injured athletes. The scholarship, established after All-American USC swimmer Mike Nyeholt was paralyzed in a 1981 motorcycle accident, would cover full tuition, housing and expenses.

Even the best insurance won’t cover all the costs of caring for someone wheelchair-bound, an around-the-clock effort. Family friends and members of the community formed the David and Goliath Project, which has raised thousands of dollars to pay for his wheelchair, a van equipped with a wheelchair lift and other rehabilitation expenses.

His doctor, Mark Wheaton, has called him “the best patient I ever had.”

David’s relationship with Sehnert also is one of mutual devotion.

“Ron is here every day, making sure things get done,” David says with a touch of amazement. “I asked him one day, ‘How did you convince all these people to do this? It’s a recession now.’ A lot of them come in on Saturday, and some of them are contractors who maybe Ron helped at some time. It shows you there really are people who want to help.”

Attached to the kitchen downstairs and his parents’ bedroom upstairs, the two-story addition offers enough space for David to have a real bedroom plus his special computer, which he operates by blowing Morse code signals into an air tube.

The upstairs room will be used for physical therapy and, possibly, an attendant. A bathroom on each floor is roomy enough for either a wheelchair or gurney to be rolled in. Other extra touches: the letters DL in rose-colored linoleum at the front entrance to the wing, mirrors and bougainvillea “to cheer the place up,” Sehnert said.

Several days ago, 15 volunteers bustled about the home, racing to get the project completed by David’s birthday.

“It’s unbelievable,” murmured Cornelia Lupash as she arrived home from her job as a Long Beach City College chemistry professor. She and her husband, Tiberius, a supervisor in the public works engineering division of the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station, take shifts working and caring round-the-clock for David.

Evan Harbottle, owner of AEH Corp., has for weeks driven the 80 miles from Temecula each day to help pour concrete for the volunteer effort, identified by a sign on the front lawn that reads: “This project funded by love.” He estimates he and his employees have spent about 80 hours on the project, and he hasn’t even figured what that costs him.

“I really don’t consider it that way,” Harbottle said. “He’s a very nice boy, intelligent, considerate.”

Daniel Montoya, a Huntington Beach landscaper, recalled how he and six employees became involved in the effort, donating a week and a half’s time.

“Ron called me and told me he was doing something important, and he asked me, ‘How big is your heart?’ I say pretty big. . . . Anything like this, (having) to do with a kid, you’ve gotta help.”