North Texas teens recover after being hit by lightning

By DEANNA BOYD, STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER

From atop the West Spanish Peak in Colorado, Zach O'Neal, 15, and his 16-year-old friend Ernie Elbert celebrated their successful climb Sunday. They snapped photos of the spectacular view with O'Neal's cellphone. They marked their achievement by signing their names on a scroll kept atop the mountain and placing rocks in a cross formation. And they made a phone call to O'Neal's family, waving their hands wildly and dancing while the family watched through a telescope from the deck of their vacation condo miles away.

But within minutes, things took a terrible turn. A frantic Elbert called the O'Neals again, this time screaming for help. A bolt of lightning had hit Zach O'Neal on top of his head, sending electricity coursing through both teens and leaving the Aledo teenager motionless on the ground. They were alone and miles away from help.

In an hours-long ordeal Sunday afternoon, Elbert, injured but alert, used CPR to resuscitate his friend -- something he'd learned in his freshman health class. The two teens then prayed together before making the painful, slow journey down the mountain to the help that waited below. "God was definitely on the mountain with us," O'Neal said Monday, in a telephone interview from the Pueblo hospital where he and Elbert were being treated.

Storms came early

For more than a decade, O'Neal and his family have been going to Cuchara, a small resort town in south central Colorado. This summer, the Aledo High School sophomore was told he could take a friend. O'Neal asked Elbert, of Fort Worth, a junior at Paschal High School. The two were good friends. Their fathers play in a band together. Their families attend the same church.

Not long after arriving in Colorado, the teens decided they wanted to climb West Spanish Peak, a challenging but relatively safe hike to just over 13,600 feet. Their plan did not worry O'Neal's family. Two family friends in their 70s had taken the hike before. A forest ranger said the boys would be fine as long as they left the mountaintop around noon to avoid the frequent afternoon storms. But on Sunday, the storms came early.

After reaching the peak just before noon, O'Neal and Elbert saw a flash of lightning to the south, but it seemed far away. They ate the turkey sandwiches they'd brought along and began to pack up for the trek home. "All of a sudden my legs and waist kind of cringed and there was a big bang," Elbert said. "Everything felt really hot and I fell back."

Stunned, he took a few seconds to realize what happened. Immediately he looked for O'Neal, finding his friend a few feet away, lying on his back. His jeans had been shredded. His jacket had melted into his skin. His socks and his shoes, sturdy hiking boots he had borrowed from his grandfather, had been blown off. "He had blood on his eyebrow. He wasn't really breathing," Elbert said. " I went over and I did what I could remember of CPR. I still don't know if I did it right."

Gayle O'Neal, Zach's grandmother, was the one to answer Elbert's frantic phone call. At first, she said, she gently scolded the teen for playing such a joke. "I handed the phone to my son, Scott. Then I saw Scott's expression," Gayle O'Neal said. "Ernie had started crying." Scott O'Neal called 911, then jumped on a dirt bike and headed for the mountain. The rest of the family jumped in the car, comforting Elbert on the telephone as they rushed to the mountain's base to help direct rescue workers to the teens' location.

Limping down the mountain

Elbert first noticed his friend's lips trembling, then saw his chest rise and fall in shallow breaths. "I knelt next to him and started praying," he said. "After a while he started breathing heavily and then started moaning."

O'Neal awoke confused, asking repeatedly what had happened, then forgetting what he had been told and asking again. Although O'Neal said he doesn't remember those conversations, Elbert said it was at his insistence that they began to head down the mountain. "He said he was really cold and he was hurting really bad and so we needed to go down," Elbert said.

But before they did, O'Neal told Elbert that the boys should pray. "We knelt down and prayed that God would give us the strength, and he did," Elbert said.

With one of O'Neal's hiking boots destroyed, walking on the mountain's loose rock proved difficult. "He couldn't walk in them at all. I gave him one of my tennis shoes, which were also torn up but not quite as bad, and we went down the mountain," Elbert said. "We were limping down as fast as we could."

About an hour after the lightning strike, O'Neal's father reached the teens. With his help, they continued down. They met the first of several emergency responders about an hour later at the timberline. Both teens had wounds on their feet, burns and singed hair. In addition, O'Neal had a large wound near his eyebrow that required three stitches. After receiving medical aid, O'Neal was whisked away in a helicopter to St. Mary-Corwin Medical Center in Pueblo.

Elbert rode down the rest of the way, about two miles, on an all-terrain vehicle with David DeTray, assistant fire chief with the La Veta Protection District, before the O'Neals took him to St. Mary-Corwin. "He saved his buddy's life without a doubt," DeTray said in a telephone interview Monday. "I told him I thought he was an angel. I just think it's remarkable that kids that age have the compassion for each other, especially in this day and age."

Getting back to normal

DeTray said that in his 17 years of fire and emergency medical service, he had worked only three incidents in which people have been struck by lightning. In each of those, he said, the strike proved fatal. "That is the first lightning strike that I've seen anyone walk away from," DeTray said.

Since 1980, people have been struck by lightning 437 times in Colorado, according to the National Weather Service. Seventy-five of them have died. O'Neal was kept in intensive care Sunday night while Elbert was housed in the pediatrics unit as doctors ran tests to make sure neither had any internal damage.

The two teens traded barbs in messages passed by O'Neal's parents. "He made fun of me because he said I got the wussy end of the lightning. I made fun of him because he couldn't stay awake during the shock and he didn't duck in time," Elbert said, laughing. "He's definitely got his sense of humor back."

By Monday afternoon, the two teens were sharing a room in the pediatrics unit and playing Nintendo. "My husband said it was the very best and the very worst day ever," said Kelly O'Neal. "We feel that God's hand of protection was over them. They are just incredibly blessed and fortunate. We just can't thank Ernie enough."