A Bolt From The Blue : An Injury, Like a Flash of Lightning, Comes Quickly and Without Warning. Recovery, Though, Isn’t Nearly as Fast

SANTA ANA â€”  Kya Whitfield watched her daughter’s team warm up on the softball diamond and saw the lightning in the distance.

When it started to rain steadily that April morning seven years ago, the Tustin Bobby Sox coach, John Bates, told his team to leave the field. He told two others to retrieve a couple of softballs still on the infield while he put equipment away.

The youngsters followed Bates’ suggestions. Eight of them, and an assistant coach, gathered at the trunk of an oak tree to escape the rain.

They were there maybe 10 seconds before it happened.

The flash and the explosion came at the same time.

“When it hit, they all did a quarter turn all at the same time and fell on the ground,� Whitfield recalled. “I kind of laughed--it was spontaneous, and the way they did it, it was kind of funny.

“I feel terrible. It bothers me a lot that my initial reaction was one of humor. I did a little chuckle: In my mind, I thought, ‘Look at that, that’s pretty good the way they did it in unison.’ Then I realized what happened.�

Lightning.

Whitfield was about 20 feet away when it struck the tree and dispersed into those standing near it. She ran to her daughter, Kaylee. It smelled “like burnt hair,� she said, though Bates remembers the smell of burning polyester as the uniforms melted to the players’ skin.

April 23, 1988, will always be a flash point in the lives of Carrie Bates, Beth Carrillo, Theresa Farnum, Katie Maggard, Wendy Meyers, Tiffany Thompson, Julie Throckmorton, Kaylee Whitfield--all between 8 and 10--and assistant coach Steve Nicolai. All were injured under that oak. Carrillo, Maggard and Whitfield stopped breathing.

Most of them were burned. But they all survived. Some continued to play sports, some did not.

This is one story of a little girl who set herself apart.

*

Kaylee Whitfield, a junior three-sport standout at El Modena, doesn’t remember the lightning and doesn’t have the psychological scars that affected some of the others.

“I remember leaning against the tree,� Whitfield said. “And I remember waking up on the ground and my mom saying, ‘Say something, Kaylee, say something,’ and she was shaking me a little bit. And the ambulance guys cut my shirt off and wouldn’t give me a towel, and they put me on a metal slate in the ambulance and it was sooo cold; they had nothing to keep me warm.�

After the lightning hit, the sky opened up and it rained violently, as though it were hailing, and the mud splashed into the children’s faces from the force of hitting the ground.

Kya Whitfield admits she was hysterical as she rushed to her daughter’s side and saw her face turn from ashen to blue, her eyes already rolled into the back of her head. John Bates doesn’t know why, but he went immediately to Kaylee instead of his daughter, Carrie, though she was also under the tree. He and Kya had learned cardiopulmonary resuscitation from the Red Cross within the past 60 days.

“I think John Bates is a hero,� Kya said.

He began CPR on Kaylee until Kya was able to compose herself enough to assist. There were few parents there, but everyone on the field rushed to the scene and a few were able to give CPR to the others who needed it. Katie Maggard, one of the most seriously burned, was the first to be revived. Bates said it was 45 to 90 seconds before Kaylee was revived, “but it seemed like an eternity.�

Now, Kya is amazed at how many things--and what things--flashed through her mind as she gave CPR to her child. “OK, if we don’t have Kaylee, it’s just going to be Jeff, Tara and I,� she recalled thinking. “You think of vacations without her, not going to her school events--will she have brain damage?�

Another parent had a cellular phone and called 911. Within 20 minutes of the 11 a.m. lightning strike, Kaylee Whitfield and Beth Carrillo were in the same ambulance speeding toward the nearest emergency facility, Chapman General Hospital.

Kaylee was lucky--even though her heart stopped--because she was the only one who didn’t suffer an exit wound from the lightning and need plastic surgery. Kya Whitfield said doctors were never able to determine why Kaylee was spared from being burned.

Kaylee, Maggard and Carrillo eventually were taken to Children’s Hospital of Orange County because of the severity of their condition. The others went to Western Medical Center.

Kaylee’s father, Jeff, was at home with his oldest daughter, Tara. They stayed home, figuring the rain would postpone the game at Edgewood Elementary (now Prentice Day) School. But one of Tara’s friends was at the field that day. She called the Whitfields to tell Tara that lightning struck the team and mistakenly said someone had died.

Tara told her father. That’s how he found out.

*

Kaylee spent two nights in the hospital--sharing the same room with three teammates, Tiffany Thompson, Beth Carrillo and Katie Maggard--and was the first to go home. The team voted to change its name from the Waves to the Shock Waves, and most rejoined the team even if they didn’t play.

Kaylee today is fascinated by lightning, “that there’s that much power floating out in space and has so much force that it can kill someone.� She has done school reports on it, and likes to watch it.

That is in stark contrast to Carrie Bates, who batted .443 this year for El Modena’s softball team.

John Bates recalled a national club tournament in Boulder, Colo., in which it started to rain. The games were stopped and hundreds of players gathered near trees after a lightning bolt struck the field. Bates couldn’t find Carrie until he looked in the distance. Several hundred feet away, away from the trees, she was sitting in an open field, her head buried in her lap.

The deepest psychological scars in the Whitfield home are Kya’s.

“After the lightning struck, I got real protective of Kaylee and didn’t want to let her out of my sight,� she said. “For about 18 months after that, I would drive along and get tears in my eyes thinking about it.�

It was for that reason Jeff Whitfield had his daughters swear they wouldn’t tell their mom about the high mountain fishing trip two months later.

“The most boneheaded thing I’ve ever done in my life,� Jeff said.

With another buddy and a pet dog, he took the girls to the Sierra Nevada, but the fishing wasn’t so good at Green Lake, which was about 11,000 feet high. They moved up, to about 14,000 feet, where Thunder and Lightning Lake provided a steady supply of brook trout. He decided to clean the fish there instead of heading back down to the lodge, despite the “spooky� storm clouds that had been building at the peak.

When the foursome started the two-mile trek down, the storm unleashed its fury. Yes, there was lightning, and one bolt hit about 400 yards in front of them on the trail. Hail the size of dimes fell. Jeff laid on top of Tara, and his friend, Tracy Smith, a minister, covered Kaylee. The dog tried to burrow under them. They stayed far enough away from each other so that if Smith and Kaylee were hit by lightning, the other two could try to revive them--and vice versa.

“It was like getting snapped with rubber bands,� Jeff said of the storm. “Three or four more bolts came down fairly close to us. My friend, the minister, is praying out loud. And I’m going to myself, ‘You have to be the biggest idiot in the world to get caught on a ridge after living through it once.’ I think Kya would have killed me if she had known. That was probably the most scared I’ve been in my life.�

The girls didn’t tell their mom.

A year later, during a club soccer championship game, Jeff said Kya was “hysterical� when there was lightning and thunder in the distance and Jeff couldn’t get officials to halt the contest. There were only a few minutes in regulation and a tie score.

“I know Kaylee and Jeff got upset at me, but I took her off the field,� Kya said.

Kaylee did get mad. “It bothered me because I wanted to play; the chances of it hitting me again are very, very slim.�

They waited in the car. Kaylee’s team won in overtime.

*

Jeff Whitfield said the lightning injury affected Kaylee’s speed and arm strength, and she suffered shooting pains in her arms for several months. He is convinced that his daughter joining El Modena’s cross-country, and then the track team, helped her regain most of that speed.

Though she’s not the prototypical distance runner--long and lean--you would never know it by the stopwatch. She was second in the 800 meters and long jump at the Century League finals this month; her best 800 is 2 minutes 21.47 seconds, and she has jumped 16 feet 5 1/2 inches.

Both parents were competitive, and Jeff is still competitive, though he says he has mellowed. He is a physical education teacher in adaptive education in Los Angeles County, and that led him into coaching.

Kya isn’t competitive anymore, but relishes the nature of sport instead of the competition.

Tara, a senior at El Modena, was fourth at the Southern Section cross-country finals and a second-team Times All-Orange County pick, and finished as high as 10th in the State meet. When she arrived at El Modena as a freshman, the Vanguards won the section title. Her sister’s arrival made the team even stronger, and they have won three section team titles in the last four years.

Kaylee, too, has been an All-Century League performer for two years in cross-country and has been on the school’s nationally ranked 4-by-1,600 meters and distance medley relay teams.

But everyone knows that soccer is her sport.

“She is definitely Division I material in soccer,� her former coach, Tino Younger, said.

In three years and 76 games, Whitfield has scored 57 goals and assisted on 40 others. A center forward with an uncanny ability to create opportunities, she scored 29 goals and had 16 assists this year.

“I’m very competitive and hate to lose with a passion because it doesn’t make me feel good,� said Kaylee, who has a 3.6 grade-point average. “It’s a driving force. I feel good about myself after I’ve worked out, where I feel like I’ve done something productive that day.�

El Modena had never won a league soccer title until Whitfield arrived and has now won two in a row. They have won 57 games the last three years. She was an all-league player each year. This past season, Whitfield was a first-team Southern Section Division II and Times all-county player. She was selected the school’s 1994 athlete of the year by the Orange Rotary Club.

Certainly, Kaylee has been the most athletically decorated of the Shock Waves.

But footwork and instincts aren’t all that set Whitfield apart from other players. Those who know her talk about her spirit, how she is so encouraging and empathetic and sensitive to others.

“I try to listen to everyone and not talk about myself a lot,� Whitfield said. “I’m really interested in what people have to say.�

She said she doesn’t like the attention that comes with retelling her brush with lightning. Her story isn’t common knowledge, and she doesn’t mind it that way--she’s already bothered by those who occasionally tease her by making a buzzing sound when she walks past.

“I think it’s dumb,� she said.

But at least she can walk past those insensitive souls on her own.

“One time we had a girl on the club team break a leg and everyone was upset--Jeff was the club coach at the time and was really upset,� Kya Whitfield said. “So the girl won’t be able to play for a year. So what? So what if she can’t play soccer? At least this girl will be able to walk.

“You take a look at life totally differently. Whenever Jeff goes on a hunting trip, or we’re going to take an airplane flight or one of the kids is late coming home, I have to really fight the thought that something really bad happened. That all stems from that day--I know how fast it can go. Everything is fine one minute and can be gone the next.�