ELIMINATING THE GUILT

By Wayne Drehs
ESPN.com

[ print story ]

It was chaos. Doctors rushing him to a helicopter. Morphine speeding through his veins. Everyone yelling to work faster, move quicker.

But Brad Hurtig didn't notice. It was his body doctors were working on. His life they were fighting to save. Yet all he could think about was the look on Kreg Culler's face.

Culler, the owner of the factory where, a half hour earlier, a 500-ton stamping press had crushed Brad's arms, looked miserable. Shoulders slumped. Head down. Skin a bloodless white. It was his son Keenan, Brad's best friend since first grade, who had pushed the button that sent the machine crashing down.

“I kept thinking that [Brad's] parents had trusted me with two healthy boys to take care of,” Kreg Culler said. “And I didn't have two healthy boys to send back.”

While doctors and nurses hurried to pull him out of shock, stabilize his vitals and get him into an emergency helicopter, Brad saw only the guilt on Culler's face.

“This is not your fault,” he said. “Tell Keenan it's not his, either.”

It hardly made the pain go away. Kreg and Keenan would battle sleepless nights and emotional pitfalls in the months ahead. But Brad's two simple sentences helped.

When they couldn't get out of bed in the coming days, when they couldn't shake the nightmarish replays of that fateful night, Kreg and Keenan would think about Brad, lying on that gurney, his life forever changed … worrying about them.

“When my dad told me what Brad had said, I was blown away,” Keenan said. “It had to be the worst day of Brad's life, but here he was worried about how everyone else was holding up.”

That included Brad's family.

Brad and Chris are identical twins and seemingly inseperable. In every photo of Brad, there's Chris. When Chris refused to budge from the couch that summer, unable to stomach the thought of swimming or playing baseball while Brad struggled to eat, Brad insisted that Chris get out of the house and leave the pity behind. When Chris struggled on the basketball court or the football field, unable to perform without his brother by his side, Brad shook his head in disgust.

“On the field, I felt lonely,” Chris said. “Obviously there were 36 other guys out there, but I had this empty feeling that he wasn't there with me. I couldn’t keep my mind straight. Brad wouldn't allow that. He was more worried about what he was putting everyone else through than he was himself."

When his parents rushed into the emergency room to find their son a bilateral amputee that fateful night, Brad said he thought not about the comfort they provided, but how hard it must have been to see their son so helpless. In the months ahead, when his father would struggle with guilt of his own, Brad wiped it away.

“I would look at other kids that weren't as athletic and I'd find myself thinking, Why not them?” Jim Hurtig said. “I'd see this other kid, he don't mind sitting around and doing nothing, Why not him? But the way Brad handled this took all that pressure off us.”

In a split second, he had gone from a 17-year-old teenager who rode motorcycles and excelled at three varsity sports to a physical oddity, the person everyone couldn't help but stare at or, worse, the person they couldn't bare to look in the eye. In the weeks and months ahead, he'd have to learn how to do everything without hands -- from eating, drinking and getting dressed to shaking hands, brushing his teeth and driving a car.

Yet ask anyone close to Brad to pick a moment when they remember seeing him down, when they remember him asking, “Why?” and they can't. Instead, he always held his head high. He always smiled.

“Had he gone in the tank, had he taken a better-off-dead-type attitude, that would have made it that much harder,” Kreg Culler said. “But here was this 17-year-old. He's the one going through this. He's the one whose life is going to never be the same. And he's the one showing all these adults how to handle it.”

Tom Sheninger, one of Brad's high school teachers and an assistant coach on the football team, said he believes Brad's ability to accept his disability and his determination to overcome it stems deep from within. There, Sheninger says, was a desire to return to normalcy, so Keenan, Kreg and everyone else could put that horrible night behind them.

“Brad was not going to have anybody carry the guilt with them that they ruined his life,” Sheninger said. “He wasn't going to stand for that.”

This past football season, after each of his 111 tackles, Brad would motion to Keenan in the stands. He'd wave with his stubs. And he'd smile. Keenan, meanwhile, was Brad's biggest fan. He wore a gold T-shirt with big black letters that read, “Brad Hurtig is a True American Hero.” And on the back, “Chris is pretty good, too.”

“I didn't like to see people upset," Brad said. "I'll never forget, laying on that gurney that night and seeing that expression on Kreg's face. That bothered me. I wanted to show I was strong, that I could handle it and things were all going to be OK. There was no sense in making everyone more upset than they already were.”

That includes proceeding with any litigation. An investigation by U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration found five “serious” violations at A-Stamp Industries, Culler's factory, ranging from improperly installed machine guards to inadequate training procedures. Personal injury attorneys still harass Brad and his parents with unwanted solicitations, insisting there's money to be made. But the Hurtigs continue to ignore them, and say they've never even considered a lawsuit.

Kreg Culler did. And came to one lasting conclusion.

“There's no question,” he said, “if sacrificing the business would put Brad's arms back together, I'd do it in a heartbeat.”

Instead, he promises to never forget.

Recently, during a school fundraiser, there was Culler bidding up to $400 for what would become his most prized piece of sports memorabilia. The football helment that Brad wore this past season now sits in an acrylic case atop a credenza in Culler's office at the factory.

“For me, it's an indication of what he accomplished after the accident,” Kreg Culler said. “His odds were a lot bigger than most of us will ever face and he made it, so keep chasing life.”

Wayne Drehs is a staff writer with ESPN.com. He can be reached at wayne.drehs@espn3.com.