Injured BMX Rider, Family Brace for Rough Road Ahead

By Katie Carrera
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 17, 2007

BALTIMORE -- Before visitors walk into Stephen Murray's room at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center to see the injured bicycle motocross (BMX) rider, his family tries to give them an idea of what they'll find.

But there isn't any truly effective preparation for them to see the typically energetic and charismatic 27-year-old who is now unable to speak or move below his shoulders. So they tell everyone about the alcove adjacent to Murray's room, or as his mother Cynthia Edgworth calls it, Heartbreak Hotel.

It's a vacancy no one wants to fill, but all of them have. A place where even the toughest, most-grizzled action sports athletes seek refuge so they don't break down in front of their friend.

"Somebody will come see Stephen for the first time and you get in there and you realize what's really going on," said Paul Roberts, Murray's best friend and a well-known BMX announcer. "It's very hard to do and it's a natural reaction. You can't prepare yourself."

On June 22 in the BMX dirt finals at the Dew Action Sports Tour's Panasonic Open, Murray attempted to throw a double back flip on the final set of jumps at the Camden Yards Sports Complex.

It was the trick that had won him an X Games gold medal in 2001, a trick he spent countless hours in the foam pit practicing for years, a trick that featured so much rotational force that very few riders land it consistently or try to do it in competition.

But Murray could pull it off, and he wouldn't attempt it if the conditions weren't right. If he wasn't set on a jump, he wouldn't try the double flip even if it was in the plan. Unfortunately that Friday, things didn't go as anyone expected.

At the full in-air height of the trick, Murray flew off the bike and landed on his head, crushing the C3, C4 and C5 vertebrae in his neck. Murray flat-lined on the way to the hospital, but was revived by the team of EMTs in the ambulance.

In the days following the crash, Murray underwent two seven-hour surgeries to fuse together the bones in the upper part of his spine and place a small titanium cage around the bones, from C2 to C6, to prohibit any future movement of the spinal cord.

According to the American Spinal Injury Association's (ASIA) impairment scale, Murray is classified as ASIA-B Incomplete, meaning he has sensory but no motor function below the region of the injury. It is unclear if he will remain paralyzed permanently.

In a sport where broken bones are commonplace, severe injury in competition is rare. Several riders called this one of the most gruesome they had seen in a BMX competition.

Calls Home

Roberts, who witnessed the crash, contacted Murray's parents in England and his wife, Melissa, in Corona, Calif., where he now lives along with his two young sons, Seth, 4, and Mason, 1.

His parents had received injury calls before, but usually from Murray himself, saying he had broken a leg or some other bone and that it was nothing serious. It was around 3 a.m. in England when Edgworth received a call saying she should come to the hospital, and she called her ex-husband, Stephen's father, Jeffrey Murray.

"Straight away, all I wanted to do was get organized get over here and how could I do it," he said, adding he had no idea what awaited him in Baltimore.

There were three open seats remaining on that morning's British Airways flight to Baltimore. He and Edgworth were at their son's side by mid-afternoon the day after the crash. Melissa, who was unavailable for comment for this story, had arrived early that morning from California.

"I can honestly say for the first week, we had no idea what was going on," Edgworth said, explaining that one of the first pieces of information Murray's family received is that shock-trauma-ward patients are checked every 15 minutes because their status can change at any moment.

"They say to you, 'Live hour-by-hour.' And you're like, 'Okay, sure.' " Edgworth continued. "The first couple of days you think, 'Okay, well, we're going to do this . . . and then something knocks you down.

"One day he's breathing on his own, the next day he's got pneumonia and his temperature is 104. Then the next day everything seems to subside, and then something positive will happen."

It is that daily roller-coaster ride from improvement to regression and back again that has Murray's family and friends riding a line between optimism and realism. Whenever someone has a bad day, other family and friends are there to pick up the slack, making sure that everyone eats even when they're not hungry and sleeps even when they're not tired.

"When you have somebody close to you who's done the type of things Stephen's done, it makes you realize what you're attempting to do isn't all that insurmountable," Roberts said.

'Nothing's Impossible'

This week, as they prepare to move Murray from Baltimore to Craig Hospital in Denver, which specializes in spinal-cord-injury rehabilitation, his family remains steadfast in the belief that if given the best opportunities to recover, Murray will surprise them all.

"We're of the opinion that nothing's impossible, and we're going to do everything to give Stephen the best shot," Jeffrey Murray said. "Somewhere down the line there's going to be some improvement. Whatever that is, we know that it'll be the best that's been possible."

And Stephen Murray is raring to go. One of his first requests was to see footage of his crash. Although he cannot force air over his voice box to talk, Murray can communicate as everyone around him has gotten better at lip reading. His family expects him to eventually regain his ability to speak.

Lately most of his questions have been asking Edgworth when he'll be headed to rehab. An attempt to transport Murray to Denver last week was unsuccessful when, in an ambulance headed to the airport, his heartbeat slowed and then stopped. After stabilizing him at a nearby hospital, the decision was made for him to stay in Baltimore a little while longer.

Neither Edgworth nor Jeffrey Murray expected that BMX would take them around the world as they watched their sons compete, or how much that time on the road would strengthen the strong family bonds that have enabled them to help each other now. And neither would change any of it.

"Even in this state that he's in now, I don't regret him doing it," a quiet Edgworth said. "It's not for me to say if he'll ever do it again, but if he was physically able to, he'd want to."