Accident Victim’s Journey Home to Be a Test of Endurance

An Amtrak train smashed into Daniel Wilkinson last month, mangling his body and leaving him in a coma.

Wilkinson, 18, barely survived the accident.

Now that he’s on the mend, he wants nothing more than to get home to Missouri.

To do that, he needs to demonstrate that he can sit in a wheelchair for six hours -- the time it takes to fly from Orange County to Springfield. But it is no small feat for a man with one ruined kidney, a half-working liver, a broken arm and a fractured pelvis.

Sitting outside Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo on Friday, Wilkinson measured his progress in minutes. On Wednesday, he had finally passed the one-hour mark. On Thursday, he had stretched that into an hour and fifteen minutes. On this day, he would try for two.

“All I’ve got to do is get to 1:15 p.m.,” he said, with 20 minutes to go.

Near the end, the pain was so intense that tears came to his eyes. So he tried to spread the pain around, shifting his weight from left to right, forward to back.

The sessions are agonizing, but the monotony afterward is even worse. In silence, Wilkinson is stuck with his thoughts, replaying the accident in his mind.

“I had a lot of beers that night,” he said. “I don’t remember how many.”

He and a group of teenage friends had been celebrating by San Clemente State Beach. A train rumbled by, and Wilkinson and another teen jumped back, scrambling onto nearby rocks. Soon after, Wilkinson said, a second train thundered toward them, but this time, he couldn’t get out of the way in time.

He saw lights, then heard honking. And suddenly, everything went dark.

“I know what I did was stupid,” he admitted. “I shouldn’t have been drinking. I shouldn’t have been near the tracks. It’s hard to go through all this pain and to think about what it’s caused for my parents.”

His parents flew from Springfield within hours of the accident. After two weeks, his mother could no longer afford to stay, returning to work at a Missouri bank. His father, a retired baker on disability, decided he would stay regardless of the cost.

Edd Wilkinson, 53, who walks with a cane, now works four hours a day at a local Best Western hotel in return for a room.

Adversity is nothing new to the Wilkinsons. In the last five years, the father lost his right kidney to cancer; the family’s eldest son had his left leg amputated; cancer claimed the right lung of Daniel Wilkinson’s grandfather; and his grandmother went into the hospital for surgery and came out bedridden, on a respirator.

With Wilkinson uninsured, the accident may be the family’s greatest misfortune yet, his father said. The hospital bills could total around $240,000, and the family may be forced to declare bankruptcy.

But for most of his life, Daniel Wilkinson seemed untouched by the family’s bad luck, said his mother, Christina. Her youngest child had enjoyed perfect health, she said.

The only problems he had involved motivation.

“He dropped out of high school and just bummed around,” his mother said. “I told him to shape up or ship out.”

Wilkinson chose the latter. He ran away in November and joined a crew of teenagers traveling across the country. They sold soap door-to-door by day and partied by night.

“He just got mixed up with the wrong people,” his mother said. “They just had no goals in life.”

After three months of running away, Wilkinson finally has goals. Right now, the biggest one is to be able to sit for six hours on an airplane headed for home.