Grievously injured Clark County deputy survives epic disaster thanks to series of ‘miracles’

Drew Kennison walked out of his house that February morning and felt snowflakes on his cheeks.

He knew his wife and their three children would be thrilled by this unexpected late-in-the season gift. But as much he wanted to toss snowballs with them, the 40-year-old Clark County Sheriff’s deputy had a full day ahead. He threw his gear in a department-owned, two-wheel-drive SUV and pulled away from his Ridgefield home. He had no reason to suspect it would be the worst day of his life.

Kennison, a new member of an elite, multi-agency SWAT team for Clark County, was scheduled to attend an advanced tactical-weapons class at a firing range in rural Skamania County, some 30 miles outside of Vancouver.

Normally, the drive was easy and pleasant. But by the time Kennison reached Washougal he was struggling to maintain control of the car on the snow-covered road, the first sign that the February 22 storm would be impressive. He stopped, got out and slipped chains over the rear tires.

Eventually, about a quarter mile from the range, he pulled over and set out on foot, carrying his short-barrel rifle and other gear. As he walked up a hill through deep powder, he heard trees in the surrounding forest cracking under the weight of the snow.

At the range, Kennison shot a team-issued special weapon from different positions during the training session, running, strategizing and adapting as various obstacles were thrown into his path. The instructors actually were pleased to have the snowstorm gumming up the course. Special Weapons and Tactics officers never know when the call for help will sound or where it will take them, so they seek out less-than-ideal conditions for drills and coaching. Their unofficial motto: If it ain’t raining, we ain’t training.

Kennison found the snowy session exhilarating. He was proud to have made it onto the SWAT team, a longtime goal, and enjoyed the work. While attending Portland State University in the early 2000s, he’d wanted to go to law school and become a prosecutor. Then he signed on for the Clark County Sheriff’s cadet program. The part-time gig lets college students work alongside officers. Kennison came to believe that a police officer, so close to daily trauma and victims, could have a greater impact in the community than a prosecutor.

After graduating from PSU, he joined the Clark County Sheriff’s Office. He spent time on patrol and then with the tactical detective unit. He became a certified emergency medical technician. He set his sights on the SWAT team because he wanted to be on the front line when things went south.

On February 22, he ended up on the front line – just not in the way he had ever anticipated.

After the training, Kennison climbed into his car and pulled into the middle of an eight-vehicle law-enforcement convoy headed down Salmon Falls Road.

They’d traveled about two miles when a massive tree limb fell onto Kennison’s SUV.

There had been no warning. Kennison felt a shuddering thump, and instinctively tried to pull the car over to the side. But he couldn’t feel anything in his left hand.

He stared at his arm, confused.

It turned out the arm was broken in two places. The shoulder yanked out of the socket. He noticed the car’s dashboard had collapsed in front of him, and he couldn’t see his legs.

Blood gushed down his left leg. He knew from his medical training that the femoral artery in his thigh had been severed. That meant he would lose consciousness in about 45 seconds.

And that would be it. He would die.

***

Drew Kennison didn’t die in the minutes after the crash – because he wasn’t alone out there.

One of his SWAT colleagues appeared on the driver’s side of the car. The man peered through a small gap where the window had been, the roof having crushed the window pillar.

The officer reached in and began to apply a tourniquet to Kennison’s left arm, the obvious injury.

“I told him I needed it on my leg,” Kennison recalled recently. “I’d bleed out more quickly from that leg injury. He reached in and [put] that tourniquet perfectly on my leg.”

A radio call for help had gone out. But the snowstorm, which would turn out to be the metro area’s biggest in 80 years, was causing havoc. Medical rescue helicopters were grounded. The team would have to wait for an ambulance to make it there through the snow.

What happened next was the start of what Kennison describes as a series of small miracles.

“Each of these things,” he said, “had to happen in the order they did for me to survive.”

As the officers were making their way down from the firing range, a public-utility truck passed the convoy, headed in the opposite direction.

“I don’t know why, but the crew turned around,” Kennison said. “They showed up, saw the tree on my vehicle, and the crew used their saws to cut it up.”

Residents in the semi-rural area came out of their homes with blankets the SWAT-team members used to keep Kennison warm. The neighbors worked together to carry the pieces of the cut-up tree limb away from Kennison’s SUV.

Nearly 40 minutes after the tree fell, a rescue ambulance made it to the site.

“They didn’t have to waste precious time dealing with getting the tree off the rig,” Kennison said. “I listened to them talk about how they wanted to cut open the cab of the vehicle to get me out. I was feeling faint. I told them it would take too much time. I wasn’t going to make it.”

The only option, they told Kennison, was to use a tool to pry open the driver’s side of the car. The tool’s powerful jaws would be just inches from Kennison’s face.

“Do it,” he said.

They did it, and Kennison was out of the vehicle, on a backboard and in the ambulance.

***

Leah Kennison had come into the house after playing with her kids in the snow. Her phone rang. Someone from the sheriff’s office said her husband had been injured and was being taken to the closest hospital – Vancouver’s PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center.

She called her father-in-law to come over and stay with the couple’s two sons, 14 and 5, and their 4-year-old daughter. When Leah Kennison was on the way to the hospital, her husband called. One of the crew in the ambulance held the phone close to Drew Kennison’s face so he could speak to his wife.

“I told her I was fine,” he said. “I was trying to downplay it.”

His wife, an MRI technologist at Vancouver’s Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center, was waiting at the PeaceHealth emergency room when her husband arrived. The paramedics rushed him into the ER, and she followed.

She watched as the trauma team got to work. She asked if she could kiss her husband. The trauma doctor bluntly told her no.

When the team removed the tourniquet, Drew Kennison’s vital signs plummeted. He was losing blood from the severed artery.

“At one point I said to someone, ‘Don’t you dare let my husband bleed out on that table when he fought so hard to stay alive,’” Leah Kennison recalled. “They finally got him leveled out. He was unconscious, but I was able to kiss his face.”

From her experience, Leah Kennison knew her husband’s severe injury meant he’d be sent to North Portland’s Legacy Emanuel Medical Center, a Level I trauma center.

She was right.

The team placed a cage over Kennison’s left leg and ran an external stent from the good section of the femoral artery in the upper thigh, using a tube to get the blood circulating in the lower leg in in the hopes of saving it.

Once again, the snowstorm prevented a medical helicopter from flying. Her husband would have to go by ambulance in the middle of the raging snowstorm.

“After everything I’d seen I wasn’t going to leave Drew’s side,” she said. “I told the driver I was going, and she let me ride with her.”

The distance between the two hospitals is 13 miles. On a typical day, with lights flashing and siren blaring, it’s a relatively quick trip.

Because of the snowstorm it took nearly two hours to get Kennison to Emanuel.

Interstate 5 was gridlocked, cars stuck, some abandoned. The ambulance was trapped. The maverick of an ambulance driver thought differently.

“To this day I don’t know who she is,” said Leah Kennison. “She was determined and kept her cool. She had to weave in and out of cars. Semi-trucks were sliding toward us. She’d get stuck, find a small opening, go right up next to the freeway wall and step on it. I don’t know how she did it, but she got us there.”

The operating team at Emanuel worked on Kennison for nearly four hours. His wife waited, knowing the possibility of his leg being saved was slim.

“Too much time had passed,” she said. “An hour in the car in the woods, an hour getting to the first hospital and two hours to get to the second one.”

At 10 p.m. a vascular surgeon came out to speak to Leah Kennison. He told her he was worried about blood clots. If one broke loose, he said, Drew Kennison could die on the table.

“He said he wasn’t asking me, he was telling me,” she said. “He said they were going take Drew’s leg from above the knee.”

She accepted the news. Kept her composure.

“I told him I was thankful he made the choice,” she said. “If he’d asked me to make it, I told him I didn’t know if I could do it.”

The doctor returned to the operating room.

Leah Kennison cried.

“My gorgeous, confident husband had to lose a leg,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine what it might do to him mentally.”

Leah spent the night in the hospital. Her husband was intubated, knocked out on pain medication, ghostly white.

But he was alive.

She had a husband.

Her children had a father.

Drew Kennison woke up early the next morning.

“He looked at me with big eyes,” she said. “I could tell he was scared. I told him we were at Emanuel, in the ICU. I said I loved him.”

Moments later he pointed toward his left leg.

“I didn’t want to tell him,” said Leah Kennison. “I wanted the doctor there. I said nothing. He just kept pointing down to his left leg.”

“You’re going to make me tell you?” she finally said.

He nodded.

“They took it,” she told her husband. “The leg is gone from above the knee.”

With his right hand, Kennison motioned for his wife’s hand. She reached out, he took her hand in his and turned it over so he could see her palm.

“He used two of his fingers and made a motion on my palm like his fingers were walking.”

He let her hand fall.

“Yes,” she told her husband. “You’re going to walk again.”

Once more, he motioned, taking her hand in his, using the same way to communicate.

Slowly, with a trembling finger, he traced one letter at a time.

S…W…A…T

His wife’s heart ached. She knew how hard he’d worked to make it onto the elite team, joining it just a month before. She knew how much it meant to him.

“Let’s not talk about that right now,” she said.

Her husband nodded.

He fell asleep.

Leah Kennisson couldn’t hold back any longer. She cried again.

***

Later that day, some of Kennison’s SWAT brothers showed up. Men more of action than words, they gathered around his bed and got right to the point.

Recuperate.

Come back.

He wondered if he actually could. Could he meet the rigorous physical requirements?

He wanted to believe he could.

“That was the moment, right there in that bed,” Drew Kennison said. “That became my motivation.”

Given the severity of his injury, he knew he could retire on a medical disability. He dismissed the idea.

“The world is a difficult place,” he said. “My kids are going to deal with that. And when it happens, I want them to see that I didn’t quit. If I could keep going, then they’ll know they can keep going, too.”

The first step to possibly making it back onto SWAT came when he transferred to Northwest Portland’s Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center for its intensive rehabilitation program.

The journey would be long and physical and emotional, he was told. He’d have to reinvent himself, learn anew how to take a shower, even how to sit on a toilet, while waiting for the wound to heal.

The deputy would have to demonstrate grit. He had to mourn what he had lost, but not lose hope.

An occupational therapist came to his room five days after the amputation to see if Drew Kennison was up to the task. He asked if the deputy could safely get from his bed to a wheelchair with no left leg and a left arm in a cast.

He did it.

Could he wheel himself from his room to the hallway and back with one arm?

He did it.

Could he wheel himself around the entire floor?

“I’m a competitive guy to a fault,” Drew Kennison said. “I said fine, let’s go.”

When it was time for the deputy to return home, a hospital staffer pushed him out of the building in a wheelchair and helped him get in the passenger seat of his wife’s car for the trip to Ridgefield. Leah Kennison pulled the car out of the hospital’s driveway and onto a street.

Up the block, her husband noticed a police car. A moment later, the officer turned on the patrol car’s overhead light.

At the next block, another cop car and another signal.

Again and again, all the way to the freeway.

As the couple headed north, they saw police cars on every overpass, lights on, officers waving to them, citizens joining in.

“That’s an honor guard for fallen officers,” Drew Kennison said. “I’ve been there. Living officers don’t get to see that sign of respect. It was a sobering experience.”

When he arrived home, his SWAT brothers were there holding the team’s official banner. He and his wife broke down in tears.

“Apart from marrying my wife and seeing my kids born,” he said, “it was the most intense emotional experience of my life.”

He settled in at home in the weeks that followed, gained strength and eventually was fitted with a high-tech prosthesis.

“If I’m wearing long pants, you might not be able to tell that I’ve had an amputation,” he said.

In late July, six months after he was injured, Drew Kennison returned to work.

Now assigned to the detective unit, he works cases, interviewing victims, tracking down suspects.

It is a temporary assignment, he pointed out. He’s learning how to run on his new fake leg, how to squat and lift weights, all in preparation to take the challenging physical test required to get back on SWAT. He plans to take the test early next year.

“It’s what I need to do,” he said.

He is a different man now, he admits. And that’s a good thing.

“My life was spared,” he said. “If I’d been driving one second faster, the tree would’ve hit me in the head, and I’d be dead.”

He thinks about that often, and the sequence of events that followed that kept him alive.

“There must be something worth keeping me around for,” he continued. “If it’s just to be a husband, dad and cop, that’s good enough for me.”

But there is more, he believes.

“There may eventually be someone who sees me and grows up to be a cop when they didn’t think it was something they could do,” he said.

That means doing the job every day, just like any other cop.

The last week of August, he was working with officers from the sheriff’s office, the Vancouver Police Department and the U.S Marshals Service to serve arrest warrants on drug traffickers in the metro area – always a potentially dangerous task.

In the thick of it, he wasn’t thinking about his leg, not even for a moment.

Deputy Drew Kennison had work to do.

— Tom Hallman Jr

503-221-8224; thallman@oregonian.com; @thallmanjr

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