Burned Baby Now a ‘Diamond of Sparkling Beauty’ as Adult

Sept. 15, 1979, was warm and bright, just as the Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted, Trish Noel remembers telling another tollbooth worker that afternoon.

“It was a beautiful day, a gorgeous, sunny day,” she said. “The almanac said it would be a perfect day to do anything.”

But at 4:30 p.m. on that perfect day, Noel reached out to take a toll and she froze: A 40-ton tractor trailer was bearing down on the booths. The 18-wheeler was barreling directly toward a line of cars, and Noel knew it couldn’t stop.

“He just hit the last car in line and splattered them,” Noel recalls. “Cars, metal, glass flying everywhere.”

When the crashing stopped, the screaming began. “It’s something that you don’t ever forget--the sound of that mother screaming. I can still hear it. . . .

“ ‘My baby’s trapped!’ ”

The truck’s impact threw vehicles together like jumbled shopping carts, and it ruptured the gas tank of a car holding 22-month-old Joel Sonnenberg, still strapped into his safety seat.

The toddler was riding with his father, Michael, and his uncle in the car just ahead of his mother and aunt. The men stumbled out, each thinking the other had Joel.

The car was now a ball of flames, the toddler crying inside.

A stranger reached into the inferno, grabbed Joel and the car seat, and pulled them free. Someone poured water on the child. Protected only by his diaper, Joel was burned over 85% of his body, the seat’s plastic fused to his skin.

“He was burned beyond description,” says his mother, Janet Sonnenberg. “There was very little structure to his face at all, just what you’d expect if you put skin over bone.”

He lost his ears, his left hand, fingers on his right hand and flesh and skin covering part of his skull. Doctors said they had never seen anyone survive an injury so severe to the skull.

But Joel did survive. And finally, last month in a courtroom, he met the truck driver who changed his life.

Truck Driver Jumps Bail

While doctors in a Boston hospital worked to save Joel, police arrested Reginald Dort.

The truck driver from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, said he was hauling onions from Massachusetts when his brakes failed as he approached the tollbooth. He was powerless to prevent the crash, he insisted.

He was charged with second-degree assault and released on $1,000 bond.

By the time Joel was well enough to go home a few months later, Dort had disappeared. He returned to Canada and continued trucking, crossing the border hundreds of times over the next 18 years. A former lawyer for Dort said the trucker wasn’t hiding; he simply believed the case wasn’t being pursued.

All those years, Janet Sonnenberg wondered what had happened to Dort. But much harder questions came from her son.

At age 4: “When is my skin going to be smooth and soft like yours?”

At 5: “When am I gonna have fingers? When are they going to come in?” (“As if they were teeth,” his mother says.)

At 8: “Mom, why did that truck hit us?”

That question may never be answered. Dort, finally arrested last summer when his New Hampshire record surfaced during a license check at an Illinois weigh station, has refused interview requests. Last month he was sentenced to three to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree assault and jumping bail.

At the judge’s prompting, he said a brief “I’m sorry” to the Sonnenbergs.

Joel’s father had been waiting for that.

“I come here to hear you say, ‘I’m sorry.’ When you ask for forgiveness, I will forgive, but I won’t forget,” Michael Sonnenberg said. “You took a vibrant, bouncing baby and gave me back a smoldering, screaming lump of coal.”

A lump of coal, he added, that turned into a “diamond of sparkling beauty.”

Rising from the Ashes

Now 20, Joel describes his life as a “storybook.” He has excelled at school and sports and is an accomplished public speaker. He was president of his sophomore class at Taylor University in Indiana.

“It’s a Cinderella story,” he says. “It’s almost hard to believe I’m living this life.”

Joel underwent surgery more than 40 times in four years. “I grew up in a hospital,” he said. “I looked like a little monster.”

As a child, his parents took him to the mall and told him to look shoppers in the eye, smile and say, “Hi.”

When he was 5 or 6, he asked them if he was ever going to get married.

“They just looked at each other,” he said. “I started crying because I knew what I was up against. It’s a cruel world.”

Prayers a Gift

But among those who stared, who told him, “Take off your mask,” who left restaurants repulsed, there were those who gently touched his arm.

“I’ve prayed for you every day since the accident,” they’d tell him. “Even though I’ve never met you or your family.”

Across the courtroom, while telling Dort that he’d robbed him of his childhood, he added: “What you can’t steal are thousands of prayers people prayed for my family.”

His faith, he said, has prevented bitterness. A year ago, while having lunch at his younger brother’s school, he was surrounded once again by curious children. He realized his story could help them.

“Who have you ever met that could have a whole roomful of people’s attention without saying or doing anything? I can,” he said. “That’s a gift. I’d go through it all again to have God be shown to me in that manner.”

As for Dort, Joel said he has thought little of the trucker and the penalty he’ll pay.

“What could this guy suffer through to really obtain justice? If he spent the rest of his life in prison, would that come close to what I’ve suffered, not to mention my family?”

He added: “Through my life, I haven’t dwelt on the fact that he was the cause of the accident. He caused the accident, but he was not the cause of who I am.”