The night my brother died

KNOX MAN CRITICALLY INJURED AFTER HIS CAR SLAMS INTO HOUSE
Knoxville News-Sentinel, The (TN)August 30, 1996

A Knox County man was critically injured Thursday night when he lost control of his car on Roberts Road in East Knox County and slammed into a house, authorities said. Joshua Chesney, 18, of Maloneyville Road, was flown by Lifestar helicopter to University of Tennessee Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition. The accident occurred after 9 p.m. and is being investigated by the Knox County Sheriff's Department.

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Yep, ol' Boheme (Josh) was famous for one night. What the article doesn't mention is that he actually died from choking on his own teeth and blood and had to be resuscitated by the emergency crew that arrived on the scene. It also doesn't mention that he had been racing his '82 Camaro alongside another boy's Firebird, on a small, curvy road.

Boheme had just left my house that night. He had bought some window tint and dropped by my house to ask me if it was the right kind. We talked for a while and then he fired up the Camaro and sped down the road. I went in the house, plopped down on the couch and turned on the television. Not even an hour had passed before my telephone rang. My brother-n-law, Mike, was on the other end of the line. "Byron, Josh has been in a terrible car accident and they have flown him by Lifestar to UT hospital." Lickety split we drove over to Mike's house and we all piled in his car and drove to UT.

I was standing in the hallway at UT hospital, when some nurses came down the hall in front of me, pushing someone on a gurney. Curiously I looked down at the poor victim lying on that cart. Whoever it was had been in a serious accident. Their head was swelled the size of a basketball and it looked like someone had took a large cheese grater and worked them over with it. It was then that I realized...it was Boheme! I nearly threw up right there in the hallway. Oh my God, how could he have lived through that? I've seen butchered hogs that looked in better shape than he did.

The wait in the Emergency room was brutally long. We were finally told that they were placing him in ICU and that he was in critical condition. He had broken his legs, his arms, his back, his jaws, all of his teeth, you name it, he had broken it. He had deep lacerations and internal injuries. He would be lucky to survive the night.

Well, by the grace of God, Boheme survived that car crash. He spent the next year enduring countless medical treatments, therapy, and dental implants. If you see him today, you can't really tell that anything ever happened to him. But, he's got plenty of scars to prove it.

I don't know why God allowed him to live through all of that but for whatever reason, I hope he realizes how lucky he was. Check out the pics of the mangled Camaro: