The Awakening

One happy night -- Sept. 21, 1984 -- Sarah, 18, went to Tapper's bar to celebrate making the school's Dragon Dolls drill team. When the bar closed, Sarah and friends started walking down the road.

And there came Doug Doman, 21.

Two years earlier, according to records, Doug had fallen through a roof while working on a summer job. He dropped three stories, landing on his head. He spent weeks in a coma and two years in rehab. Doctors told his parents they should let him go on with his life as normal. But his friends, or the people he thought were his friends when he was a popular athlete, called him "retarded," and he felt lonely. On this night, he had asked his parents for permission to go to the pool hall, where he tried to befriend people by buying them drinks.

Doug drank too much, they say.

And he was still blind in one eye.

And got behind the wheel.

His car swerved toward Sarah's crowd.

Her friends ran.

Sarah did not run.

"The car hit her," says her dad, James Scantlin. "Slung her high, like a slingshot, over the car into another car that hit her head head-on. The second car, the impact of that second car, it is what did the damage. It killed her. She stopped breathing."

Doug drove away, drove home and passed out.

Sarah was flown to Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, an hour south of Hutchinson. She was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, trauma to her chest and an amputated finger. She had to have a lobotomy on the part of the brain that governs speech, her mother said.