Fall '03 Edition
Rising from the ashes
Andy Horonzy
Daily Egyptian
 Daily Egyptian ~ Amber ArnoldFifteen years after being rescued from the burning bus crash site near Carrollton, Ky., Harold Dennis illustrates the size to which his head had ballooned as a result of the flames and their 2,000-degree heat. |
LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Harold Dennis sits comfortably now, sprawled across a plush, leather recliner in his upscale Lexington, Ky., home. He watches as his 15-month-old son slowly crawls across the vanilla carpet in front of him, his wavy hair bouncing from side to side. He glances over at his wife, Donna, as she struggles to keep their 7-year-old daughter firmly planted in her lap.
He sees the walls that surround him, emblazoned with plaques and trophies from his years spent as a wide receiver for the University of Kentucky. He sees the numerous articles that have been written about him, all framed and mounted chronologically.
But he also sees his reflection, staring back at him from inside his infant son's squinted eyes.
Resting beneath his freshly cropped fade and above his strapping shoulders, Harold's face tells a story words cannot. His cheeks are singed and discolored. His lips are bleached and droop abnormally. His eyebrows are nearly non-existent; the only remnants the result of multiple hair implants.
Each morning, Harold rises and watches as his family darts in and out of their spacious suburban home, a small smile spreading across his face. The slight twinge in his facial muscles serves as an everyday reminder of May 14, 1988.
As he strolled across the cooling concrete of the King's Island parking lot that late spring day, nary a negative thought crossed his mind. It was 9:30 p.m. and Harold, then 14, and 66 others had spent the sweltering day inside the Cincinnati amusement park.
Many wearing clothes still drenched from last-minute water rides, 34 members of the First Assembly of God church youth group, 30 of their friends and three adults piled into a cramped school bus for the trip back to Radcliff, Ky. The group had left home at 8 a.m. and by the time they boarded the bus, Harold was exhausted.
His mesh shorts and sleeveless yellow shirt still clinging to his spindly figure, Harold made his way to the fifth row of the bus and sandwiched himself between two friends, Aaron Conyers and Anthony "Andy" Marks.
"I had on kind of like a muscle shirt and some 'old school' shorts and both of them were pretty well soaked," Harold said. "It was a hot, hot day and we were all really tired."
His clothes still dripping, Harold drifted to sleep as the bus sped down Interstate 71. He replayed the images of the trip in his head. He thought about the roller coasters, the cotton candy and the laughter, and he remembered how he almost hadn't been there to experience any of it.
For weeks, Harold and his older sister, Kim, had pestered their mother, Barbara, to let them go. But because of the cost, her answer had always been no. Barbara, a single parent with no college education, supported both her children on the small wages she earned working at a childcare facility in nearby Fort Knox.
Harold and Kim had spent most of their lives in poverty, and each made it clear to their mother they didn't want to be left out again. Barbara, despite the family's shaky financial situation, eventually gave in to their badgering and scraped together what little money she could.
It was Harold and Kim's first trip to an amusement park, and the first time they would be the same as everyone else.
It was also the last time Harold would be the same as everyone else.
As he slumped forward in his seat, his head buried between his legs, Harold managed to fall into a deep, peaceful slumber. The bus was little more than an hour from Radcliff, just outside the sleepy town of Carrollton, Ky., when the driver noticed a pickup truck heading north on I-71 in a southbound lane.
What happened next is still a mystery to Harold.
There was a loud crash, followed by an explosion, and Harold was hurled into the seat in front of him. His face slammed against the hard leather, jolting him awake. He groggily opened his eyes to see black smoke and flames consuming the bus.
A black truck had smashed head-on into the bus, slicing the bus's fuel tank. Within seconds, the bus was ablaze and the interior was shrouded in a sea of smoke. Harold first tried to escape through his window, but his trembling hands couldn't get it open.
With flames shooting in from the front of the bus, the rear emergency door became the only hope of survival for the 67 passengers. Bodies crammed into the center aisle, but it was only 12 inches wide. Harold rose from his fifth-row seat and began heading toward the nearest exit -- at the front of the bus.
"I don't think I really knew what was going on at the time," he said. "I was still kind of sleeping, so I went toward the front exit by mistake, but all I could see was flames."
The temperature in the bus had skyrocketed to more than 2,000 degrees, and Harold walked into the center of the inferno. The flames hit his face first, charring the top layer of skin on his nose and cheeks before attacking his left ear, searing the flesh that sheltered his earlobe. The heat from the blaze then circled down to his left shoulder, liquefying his nylon shirt onto his skin.
His vision blurred by the massive swelling that had overtaken his face, Harold quickly turned away from the flames and stumbled toward the rear of the bus. Through the plumes of smoke, he searched for some kind of light to guide his way. But all he could make out was an amalgamation of arms and legs flailing wildly at the exit door.
Screams of panic reverberated throughout the bus as Harold began to crawl toward the exit. Climbing over seats and the bodies of his friends, he somehow managed to reach the door only to find it swarmed by others.
"I couldn't even see out," he said. "I tried to jump out, but you couldn't because it was just so full of bodies."
Harold soon found himself buried beneath a mound of limbs, gasping for air as his breathing began to grow faint. He was on the verge of blacking out, when an unfamiliar hand grasped his arm and attempted to drag him to safety.
The hand jerked to pull Harold free -- but nothing happened. Again it jerked -- yet he still remained trapped. Finally, on the third attempt, Harold's body was wrenched free and he, along with four others, dropped to the earth below.
The force of the fall left him bruised, but it also forced him to regain consciousness. Another explosion sounded, piercing Harold's ears. Consumed by fear, he began wildly sprinting away from the bus.
 Daily Egyptian ~ Amber ArnoldJasmine (front), 7, sits in the foyer with her mother Donna Dennis and 14-month-old brother Trey at their home in Lexington, Ky. 'I got into a fight at school because another student said; your dad was burned in a fire,' Jasmine said. 'I don't like when people talk about my dad like that.' |
As the feeling in his limbs slowly returned, the searing pain of the third-degree burns that speckled his face and shoulder began to course through his body. He couldn't open his eyes. His head had ballooned to the size of a watermelon. Blades of grass dug into his blistered skin like shards of glass.
While Harold was being tended to by emergency personnel, Kim, unaware her brother had already been pulled from the flames, had to be restrained from reentering the blaze to find him. She had suffered second-degree burns on her ears and hands, but her only concern was her younger brother.
As Kim stood by watching the bus continue to burn, crowds of others joined her, frantically searching for friends and relatives. But many would never find the absolution they were looking for. Of the 67 who had boarded the bus, 27 never made it off, all either succumbing to the flames or smoke inhalation.
Harold, meanwhile, was immediately airlifted to Kosair Children's Hospital in Louisville, where he was placed in the burn unit along with Aaron and several other survivors. His mother rushed to be at his side, but nothing could prepare her for what she would see.
His head bandaged, mouth swollen shut and lungs so scarred he was unable to speak, Harold was but a shadow of the lively and athletic teenager Barbara had said goodbye to that morning. For the next two days, she slept restlessly on a cot next to his bed, hoping for some kind of movement, some sign of life.
Then, with his fingers wobbling amid the mass of tubes that lined his arms, Harold slowly scribbled a message to his mother.
"Is Kim O.K.?"
Kim wasn't the one his mother was concerned about. She had already been upgraded from critical condition to serious, and the minor lung damage she had sustained along with her second-degree burns was beginning to subside. Harold was still unable to breath on his own and each day seemed as if it would be his last.
But slowly, Harold's condition began to improve. He spent the next two weeks in intensive care, a feeding tube dangling from his mouth. He had become a human pincushion, with tubes spiraling from each of his limbs. Yet despite his feeble condition, all the motivation Harold needed was lying in the bed next to him.
Aaron, who he had met and quickly befriended that morning, had injuries that made Harold's seem almost trivial. Aaron had suffered the most severe burns of all the survivors. Most of his body was layered in gauze to guard against infection. But none of that mattered to Aaron, as he lay motionless in his bed. His 14-year old brother Joshua had perished in the crash.
Although they couldn't communicate, knowing Aaron was beside him provided Harold some solace.
"No one else could really understand," Harold said. "I understood what he was going through, and he understood what I was going through."
But Harold's morale would soon be dealt a devastating blow.
He had spent days trying to coerce his nurse into letting him see a mirror, only to be told again and again that he would be shown when he was ready. But one morning, a new nurse popped in to check on him.
"Maybe she didn't get the memo," he said.
Cries of shock and anger followed. It was the moment where Harold says he hit rock bottom.
"It was kind of like when you're a kid and you fall and scrape your leg and it doesn't really hurt that bad until you can see the blood," he said. "And when you finally do, God, it's awful."
Once he had recovered from the initial shock, Barbara decided Harold had been kept in the dark long enough. Rather than telling him what had taken place, she played him a video recording of the memorial service for those killed in the crash. It was then Harold saw the names scrolled upon the rows of gravestones. His best friend, Andy, was one of them.
"That was tough," Harold said. "I mean, how do you react to something like that?"
He had difficulty grasping that the crash that had claimed so many young lives and shattered so many families was also the worst drunken-driving accident in U.S. history. Larry Mahoney, an employee at the Carrollton M&T Chemical Plant, was behind the wheel of the pickup that ignited the blaze.
Mahoney had been drinking throughout the day and his blood alcohol level as he sped down the Interstate in the wrong direction was .24, more than twice Kentucky's legal limit. But the significance of the circumstances surrounding the crash failed to register with the 14-year-old Harold.
"Back then, I really couldn't understand it," Harold said. "At that point, it didn't really anger me any more that it was a drunk driver.
"I was just pissed off that it happened."
His anger soon dissipated and a new emotion emerged ˘ hope.
Harold spent two months in the hospital undergoing a variety of operations. The skin surrounding his eyes had to be reconstructed. The top portion of his left ear was recreated using cartilage peeled from his ribs and skin taken from his back. Other skin was cut from his thigh and grafted onto his face.
Throughout all the treatments and observation that followed, one thought never left Harold's mind.
"Seeing the next day," he said. "Getting back outside, getting back with the fellas. Just being able to do the normal stuff a 14 year old does."
Once he had improved enough to leave the hospital, Harold faced perhaps his biggest challenge yet -- high school. Transitioning from middle school to high school is hard enough for any teenager. Most are desperate just to fit in. But how could Harold expect to fit in when all it took was a glance in the mirror or a glimpse at a window to remind him just how different he was?
To compound matters, both Harold and Aaron were required to wear nylon bodysuits and masks to help speed the healing process. To smooth out their skin so it formed anew, the masks had to be rigid and highly pressurized.
"It was tight, tight, tight everywhere," Harold said. "Shit, you looked like a freak."
Nearly all of Harold and Aaron's new and old classmates at North Hardin High knew about the crash, and most were polite and accepting. But a few were not so kind.
Some simply shied away. Others stared and mocked his mask. Harold tried to shrug off their comments as best he could, but he soon decided that he'd rather face his classmates face-to-face than hide behind a mask.
"I just didn't like it," he said. "I'd rather show the scars."
While Harold removed his shield and slowly began to gain acceptance through his athletic prowess on the school's soccer team, Aaron continued to wear his mask dutifully. The mask locked them off from each other, forcing them down different paths.
Aaron's parents had just purchased a large, extravagant home and would often leave Radcliff for days at a time. Aaron saw this as his opportunity to gain acceptance and he soon began hosting parties where drugs and alcohol were served copiously. Aaron's drug use soon spiraled out of control, and by then Harold was no longer part of his life.
"That kind of stuff just wasn't me," Harold says. "I had something to shoot for."
Harold's goal was to obtain a soccer scholarship to the University of Kentucky, where his childhood idols Sam Bowie and Rex Chapman had starred for the Wildcats basketball team. Harold first began drawing the attention of Division I-A scouts during his junior year, when he was named North Hardin's most valuable player after scoring 18 goals in just 23 games.
Harold tacked on another 24 goals his senior year, and also doubled as field goal kicker for the football team, converting three of six opportunities. But despite his success, Kentucky ignored him. However, the University of Louisville began recruiting Harold and offered him a chance to earn a scholarship as a sophomore.
Harold quickly stepped into the Cardinals' starting lineup at striker, but the team limped to a 4-13-3 record his freshman year and the team's coach resigned soon after. With his passion for soccer quickly fading, he made a bold move and transferred to the University of Kentucky.
It wasn't long after his arrival on the Lexington campus that his competitive zeal began to resurface. Harold heard a rumor that the Wildcats football team was in need of a placekicker. Spurred by his newfound love for the gridiron, he attended walk-on tryouts in the spring of 1994, hoping to fill the vacant roster spot. But while his kicking skills were evident, the coaches were more impressed with what else his legs could do.
He was only 5-foot-9 and 165 pounds, but with a 4.4-second 40-yard-dash time and nimble feet honed by nearly 15 years of soccer, Harold soon became Kentucky's newest wide receiver. He had the physical tools, but the coaches told him the transformation would take time. Harold spent an entire summer working with receivers coach Joker Phillips, going through endless footwork drills, stance work and passing routes along the way.
While it took him months to learn the intricacies of a foreign position, it only took minutes to break the ice with his new teammates. Once Harold put his helmet on, his physical scars faded away. On the football field he became just one thing - a player.
 Daily Egyptian ~ Amber ArnoldHarold Dennis takes a moment to pause and reflect. Harold‚s face is forever scarred by injuries sustained in the worst drinking and driving accident in U.S. history. |
Harold saw only minimal action during his first two years with the Wildcats, recording only one reception and returning five kicks on special teams. Not that his presence went ignored.
The NCAA briefly ruled Harold ineligible in 1995 after he signed a contract with a movie studio that had shown interest in making his life story into a feature film. The Pritcher Company, a Beverly Hills, Calif., firm, and Harold had entered into an agreement that stipulated he wouldn't receive any payment until after his eligibility had been exhausted.
Despite Harold's good intentions, the NCAA still intervened.
"They basically said you either give up your eligibility or you make this movie," Harold said. "So I put the movie on hold and went back out on the field."
Oddly enough, Harold's movie venture was again set in motion just months ago when he pitched the idea to Kentucky history professor Dan Smith, an aspiring screenwriter. Smith immediately wrote a synopsis of the film, tentatively titled "Phoenix: The Harold Dennis Story." He and Harold are currently raising funds for the independent project, which Smith said is budgeted at about $300,000.
"He's someone who has risen from the ashes and just has a remarkable story of courage," Smith said. "Who wouldn't respond to someone like Harold?"
After his brief run-in with the NCAA, Harold regained his eligibility just before the start of his senior season, in which he appeared in all 11 regular season games. He only caught four passes for 28 yards and returned five kicks for 110, but the potential he showed grabbed the attention of a slew of professional scouts.
He was contacted by several Canadian Football League teams, the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League and numerous other suitors. In the end, however, he decided to go a different route. Harold took a job as a sales representative for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals in Lexington, a position he still holds today.
In addition, he also serves as an assistant football coach at nearby Lafayette High School so he can stay involved in the game that has won his heart. He says his job at Pfizer is something he enjoys, but with the Lexington Horsemen, a second-year Indoor Football League franchise just miles away, the door for his return to the gridiron is never quite closed.
"I'm going on 30 and I still feel like I got it, plus it's right here in Lexington," Harold said. "Don't tell my wife, but I'm considering it pretty seriously."
Harold has never had to hide from his wife what happened to him in Carrollton 15 years ago. Donna grew up in Elizabethtown, a neighboring town of Radcliff, so she knew all about the crash and what it had done to Harold. But that didn't stop her from approaching him in a nightclub seven years ago while both were home for the holidays.
Although Donna had a boyfriend at the time and little emerged from their first encounter, Harold was confident their paths would cross again. Two months later, they did. And this time, things went differently.
"She came up and let me know that her and her man had split and said she'd like to get to know me a little bit," Harold said. "We got together that night and we've been together ever since."
Donna and Harold dated for nearly four years before marrying in 2000, an event that Harold never thought was possible.
"To be able to overlook the physical appearance of a person, that says a lot," Harold said. "A lot of people couldn't do that. I don't even know if I could."
Donna has a 7-year-old daughter, Jasmine, from a previous relationship and together she and Harold have a 15-month-old son, Trey. Harold can still cradle Trey with only one arm, but his eyes --young, bright and full of life -- take the shape of his father's more each day.
Still, Harold can't help noticing that with each passing day, Trey begins to look at him a little different. He is still too young to know why his father looks the way he does. He is still too young to understand why some people see his father as different. But his father has never been one to hide from his reflection, and when the time is right, his son will know why.
"Would life be any different for me if this hadn't happened?" Harold said. "Would I be better off without these scars? Who knows?
"But I already did my crying, now I've got to move on. I've still got things to do, a life to live."
Andy Horonzy can be reached at: ahoronzy@dailyegyptian.com
Newsbriefs | pulse - Arts & Entertainment | Calendar | Photo Staff
Apts & Rentals | Photo Personals | Live DE NewsCam | Classified Ads
Last update: Thursday, December 4, 2003 at 8:45:57 PM
Copyright 2009 Daily Egyptian