Comeback Struggle : 6 Years After Suffering Severe Burns, Jimmy Nute Wants Little More Than to Be Just a Normal Boy

Even now, six years and countless operations later, young Jimmy Nute feels the unforgettable heat of the back-yard fire that scorched his body and scarred his life.

He senses the flames in the searing stares of adults who gawk publicly at his injuries until--lashing out in shame and anger--he has knocked clothes from their department store display racks.

At school, the 10-year-old Encinitas boy endures the even-crueler heat that comes in waves of playground name-calling--the taunts and insults that hit like blows from a hammer.

Crispy critter, the other boys call him. Burned Bub. Monster. Pigskin. Scarface. Freddy Krueger.

Most of all, though, it’s the unending surgeries--the skin transplants and scar-tissue removal--that remind Jimmy Nute of the flash fire that took only seconds to strip away his little-boy innocence, exposing him to a pain few adults will feel in a lifetime.

His mother assures him that, despite the deep burns to half his body, the transplanted skin that is still raw to the touch, or the thickening scar tissue that can make his young body stiffen unless he moves constantly, Jimmy is no different from any of his friends.

Now a fifth-grader who plays Pop Warner football and likes to surf and ride his in-line skates after school, he is indeed no longer the child whose hands were seared so badly that doctors thought they might have to amputate.

In a slow and frustrating progression, he has had to relearn to walk, to extend an arm and a leg, to move his fingers with the dexterity of his past--enough to re-master the video games he played before the accident.

His is a comeback story normally reserved for time-tested athletes, for adults with the will and perspective to right their lives after a numbing adversity. It is not usually the stuff of 10-year-old boys.

Although most of his facial burns have healed, the fire has left its mark just about everywhere else. Jimmy says the patchwork of skin grafting looks like somebody stepped on him with tire-track boots.

“It kind of looks like the desert,” he said, “where the sand has blown real hard and it makes lots of ripples.”

These days, Jimmy often struggles at being young--constantly fighting the reminders of the March, 1985 blaze that erupted as he played with two plastic lighters and a can of bug killer he found in a canyon behind his home.

Often, the memories return with something as simple as looking into a mirror. Or with the nervous questioning from curious new classmates that marks each successive school year.

“I get tired of repeating the story over and over again,” he said, fidgeting on a couch in his mother’s office at work. “No matter how much I talk about it, there’s always a new question. Sometimes, when they ask, I just say ‘house fire’ and walk away.”

And then there is the lawsuit.

Since 1988, when a product liability suit on Jimmy’s behalf was filed against one of the nation’s largest pesticide manufacturers, he has sat through depositions and cross-examinations by attorneys, answering pointed questions about the fire and its physical and emotional aftermath. It’s a day they won’t let him forget.

At issue is the cause of the fire that changed Jimmy’s life. The family’s attorney claims that a discarded 64-ounce canister of Raid Professional Strength Ant & Roach Killer--an insecticide product without child-proof packaging--was the cause of the injuries that have already cost more than half a million dollars to heal.

Mistaking the can’s plastic hose and spray-gun trigger for a toy squirt gun of water, the then-4-year-old boy sprayed the highly flammable, petroleum-based compound on a small back-yard garden fire he had started with the lighters, according to attorney Kevin Quinn.

In the process, some of the insecticide leaked onto Jimmy’s hands, Quinn said. Within seconds, the fast-moving fire had engulfed his entire body.

Lawyers for Raid’s manufacturer, S.C. Johnson & Son, see things differently. They say the fire started when one of the two butane lighters that Jimmy was playing with ignited the other--an accident that had nothing to do with their product.

Moreover, they blame the boy’s injuries on a negligent mother who, they say, should have kept a closer eye on her impetuous preschooler--a woman they describe as trying to hatch a get-rich-quick scheme at Raid’s expense.

“There are people,” said attorney Jack Henriksen, “trying to make a lot of money out of this child’s injuries.”

Soon, Jimmy’s case will go to court--for the second time.

In January, 1990, after a monthlong trial that Henriksen called his most hotly contested verdict in 20 years as a lawyer, a San Diego Superior Court jury ruled against the family’s claim--in effect, deciding that Raid was not responsible for the boy’s injuries. But the trial judge overturned the jury’s conclusion, setting the stage for more legal battles.

Earlier this month, after legal maneuverings on both sides, the state’s 4th District Court of Appeal ordered the case retried. A new trial date will be set Dec. 13. The amount of damages sought is unspecified.

According to Jimmy’s mother, Sherry Fontaine, the days spent in court, the constant intrusion of attorneys and reporters, have kept an unwanted magnifying glass focused on her son.

She has sought counseling for her guilt over Jimmy’s injuries. She is angry at herself and at a major company she says won’t own up to its own responsibility. The long-winded court proceedings, she says, only add fuel to her fire.

“I want my son to go back to being Jimmy--not the burned kid on the block,” she said. “Right now, he’s healthy and happy, and that’s the important thing--not what goes on in any trial. But, as he gets older, he’s going to need more cosmetic surgery to make him as close to perfect as he was before this fire. I want to give him that.”

Win or lose, the eventual court verdict will bring the family closer to the end of the black tunnel they entered on an overcast afternoon six years ago when Fontaine watched her only son run toward her with both hands extended, burning like two torches.

“I had been folding clothes,” she recalled. “And I told Jimmy he could go out and play in the back yard. Moments later, I knew something was wrong, the way he screamed ‘Mommy!’ And then I saw him in flames--burning from head to toe. His face, eyebrows, hair, ears, eyelashes, they were all burned.”

A doctor who first examined Jimmy in the burn unit at the UC San Diego Medical Center described him as being “fried.” Another said his skin looked like “a hot dog left too long on the fire”--some of it white and lifeless, the rest charred, blackened, swollen.

Each year, more than 2 million people nationwide are burned seriously enough to require hospitalization--most from overexposure to the sun or hot-water scalds. Of the 400 people admitted annually to UC San Diego’s burn unit, one-third of them are children, many of whom require skin grafting.

But Jimmy’s case, says nationally renowned plastic surgeon Dr. David H. Frank, was one of the most severe burns on a child he has ever treated. The boy received burns on more than 80% of his body--more than half of it third-degree, the most serious of burns.

The worst injuries came to his neck and torso. But immediately, doctors worried about Jimmy’s hands, which were so badly charred they first feared they might have to start amputating fingers.

For 17 days, Jimmy remained in intensive care as doctors began the painful process of scrubbing away his damaged skin--often down to the muscle. With so little unburned skin left on his own body to harvest for transplant, doctors used a temporary solution--attaching cadaver skin using large staples.

He spent three straight months in the hospital. And, for the year that followed, he returned daily for the arduous physical therapy. It was then, recalled his family, doctors and fellow burn patients, that Jimmy began showing the scrappiness and strength of heart that would help him through the agony of the dozen operations to follow.

At first, though, Jimmy rebelled. He screamed at doctors and nurses, using profanity few had ever heard from a preschooler.

“He would scream and cry so loud,” recalled fellow burn patient and former schoolteacher Betsy Holmgren. “He thought he was going to lose his hands. And he’d keep asking why they had to hurt him. He was so little, and he couldn’t comprehend why they had to put him through so much pain.”

Doctors say his fierce reaction actually helped his healing.

“Jimmy let it all out,” said Dr. John Hansbrough, director of the hospital’s burn unit. “It was tough, but he didn’t withdraw like so many people do. It’s natural for a burn patient to refuse to face the world, to curl up into a little ball. But Jimmy was willing to go through with things.”

Added Dr. Frank: “Despite all the pain, the therapy, the harvesting of his own skin, we had a child willing to come back, and be hurt time and again--on the mere promise that things would be better in the future.

“To me, that seems like an awfully adult perspective for such a little boy. Most kids live for today. And I think that’s what helped save him--Jimmy sees things in the long run.”

It was then, Jimmy’s mother says, that her son went from fire victim to fire survivor.

In those days, he looked more like a mummy than a little boy. Virtually his entire body--hands, neck, wrists, chest and legs--were wrapped in bandages and pressure braces designed to minimize the scarring during the healing.

His mother recalled that he walked like a “little old man--all hunched over.” When he could walk, he dragged one leg like someone with a club foot.

Then Jimmy met Joe Apodaca, a 50-year-old North County man who had been badly burned in a car-engine explosion. Joe recalls that one of his first days in therapy, as he wept in pain, a boy suddenly appeared by his side.

“I was crying like a baby and, compared to him, I wasn’t even burned that bad,” he recalled. “And here’s this little guy who’s trying to console me. That boy was so brave. He taught me something.”

The two became fast friends. Apodaca recalled one night when he couldn’t feed himself because of the bandages on his hands. “And so Jimmy spoon-fed me--even though his own hands were in braces, like two big catcher’s mitts.”

He recalled how Jimmy would ride his Big Wheels tricycle up and down the burn unit hallways, and how the two eventually chummed around the hospital. “I remember one day we walked through the cafeteria, and all these people were staring at us. Jimmy was limping with his foot turned in like some war victim.

“But he never looked back. Nothing bothered that kid. Boy, he was a tiger.”

At home, though, things were often different. The bravado that served to guard a young boy’s heart was finally let down.

Each day brought a painful routine of cream rubdowns and dressing changes. At night--in a practice he keeps to this day--he slept with an electric fan directed toward his body to ease the maddening itch from his burns.

Always, during waking hours, Jimmy was forced to wear the cumbersome braces. He would often beg his mother to take them off--especially the neck brace, which covered most of his head. When she would finally relent, he would shriek in agony when she eventually had to put them back on.

Jim Nute, Jimmy’s father, recalls that, for every screaming nightmare, however, there was a time when his young son showed an emotional strength that amazed all those around him.

On his first day home from the hospital, Jimmy dragged himself out into the family’s front yard to play Frisbee. He even played Nintendo, a game that later proved to be vital therapy, at first using a special device that allowed him to move the joy stick with his mouth.

“Often, we’d sit around and try to think of things to do--but we couldn’t go to the beach because the sand would get in Jimmy’s dressings,” the elder Nute recalled.

“Then, one day, Jimmy says he wants to go ice-skating. You should have seen him skating around with his pressure garments on--like a little Mummy Man. It was the first sport he found he could do. It was cool and didn’t involve heat. The other kids laughed when he fell, but Jimmy didn’t care. That’s when I knew that he was going to be OK. That he had that spirit.”

Several months later, however, Jimmy’s parents divorced. His father moved to New Hampshire and remarried. It’s a development Jimmy still blames on himself.

Jim Nute, 37, says that the breakup had more to do with himself and Sherry--who he says changed after Jimmy’s injury.

“She became so focused,” he said. “Jimmy was everything to her. To the exclusion of everything and everyone else.”

After a while, Sherry sold the Encinitas antique business she had run with her sister--just to spend more time with her son. Soon, the bills stacked up. Sherry went on welfare.

Eventually, she was forced to sell the house where both Jimmy and his older sister, Janae, were born, moving to a series of different apartments, different schools.

That revolving door caused its own problems. Even though his skin finally returned to its natural color after years of showing hues of red and purple, Jimmy stood out.

Once, as a third-grader, his classmates refused to hold his wrinkled hands in a school-yard game. The next year, to head off the eventual questions, he stood up in front of class the very first day of school and described his injuries in detail.

In time, the curiosity and fear of some school children has turned to taunting, he says. And, as he gets older, Jimmy has shown less tolerance for unkind remarks about his injuries.

There have been fights at school. And now he is taking karate lessons. “That way, when I get older,” he said, “I can do more damage.”

His one respite is the time he spends at home. Or the weeks spent this summer in a camp for burned children--the places where no one asks questions or makes remarks. “It was kind of neat,” he said of the camp. “When I was there, I knew what it was like not to be burnt.”

But Jimmy is still a boy whose body literally continues to outgrow its own skin. About once a year, doctors transplant fresh layers of unburned skin to help stretch areas where scar tissue has hardened--a process that gives him increased movement.

The therapy, doctors say, will continue as long as Jimmy is still growing. He’ll also require cosmetic surgery to repair his chin, which has become small and misshapen from the pulling of the scar tissue on his neck. Later, he’ll require even more surgery as the skin grafts on areas such as his knees and elbows inevitably wear out.

Meanwhile, Jimmy regularly visits a psychiatrist, preparing for the emotional pain he will later face at puberty and beyond--when personal looks will carry more acute importance.

“Right now, he still sort of wears his injuries like some badge of battle,” his mother said. “For Halloween this year, he’s going as the son of Freddy Krueger--that horrible-looking movie murderer. He’s wearing his shirt open and a flashlight so people can see his scars.

“It’s a protective mechanism that a little boy has created for himself. But someday, if more corrective surgery isn’t done, he’s going to look into the mirror, and he’s not going to like what he sees.”

For now, Jimmy spends his after-school evenings playing sports, cuddling his pet rat, Robbie. Recently, his mother rented a house not far from the one where he was burned.

Sometimes, he takes friends by the place, talking nonchalantly about his past there. “It’s the place,” he said, “where I got burned and the place where my dog died.”

The house reminds him of the time things were good--before the accident. But things are changing. Jimmy has begun to see his father again. Next summer, the two will make a special car trip out west together from New Hampshire.

New signs of understanding have come even at school. In May, after an operation on his hands, Jimmy received cards from his fourth-grade classmates--expressions of support that he cherished, his mother says.

But there was one that particularly hit home. It was a note from a playground friend, and it read: “Jimmy, you’re a brave dude.”