The Amazing Story Of Justin Stiner -- Boy Shuns Heights After Surviving Fall From Roof That Sent Spike Through His Heart

SIERRA VISTA, Ariz. - Justin Stiner, who used to have the ascending inclinations of Spiderman, doesn't climb nowadays.

No trees. No walls. Especially, he's sworn off rooftops.

It's terra firma for this 9-year-old.

That's understandable for someone who has fallen off a roof and spiked himself through the heart and jugular vein on a 4-foot steel rod, millimeters away from sudden death. Survival was amazing. His story:

-- Strapped to a board with the threaded rod inside him, he was flown by helicopter 75 miles from one hospital to another, not bleeding a drop during the 3 1/2 hours he was impaled.

-- On awakening from open-heart surgery in which the pole was unscrewed from his heart, he asked to play Nintendo.

-- He went home only four days later.

"One in a billion," one of his surgeons, Dr. Phillip Richemont, said after the Nov. 12 operation.

The third-grader took no pain medication after his third day in post-surgery. He missed only seven days of school.

"They kept telling me, `It doesn't work like this usually,' " says his mother, Amanda Stiner. Still, Justin's brush with death has changed him, she says.

From the blissful anonymity of a normal, active, adventuresome boy, he has been cast in the unaccustomed, often-uncomfortable glare of national attention.

Justin's story has been grist for the tabloids and brought him letters and gifts from around the world.

He has been flown to the world Nintendo championships, been on a syndicated television show, appeared on a talk program in Seattle and will be riding in a wagon train through New England this summer, courtesy of a pro football player's largesse.

There was a scare or two. Richemont recalls talking to his mother a week after Justin's release and learned he was "back to Evel Knievel," sliding down the stair rail.

That activity was quickly stopped, and Justin faced restrictions at school until January - no outdoor recess and no gym class.

The experience, and the scars, have made Justin self-conscious, and, his mom says, "a little cocky too, like, `I can go through anything now.' "

The ordeal certainly put his family on what she calls "a roller coaster of emotions." They were already trying to deal with his single mother's joblessness, his grandfather's serious illness and his aunt's and uncle's military duty in Saudi Arabia.

"He's real sensitive now," his mother says. "Before he was real quiet. He was really rambunctious, but he was pretty quiet. Now, you can't shut him up any more. He talks all the time."

Well, not around reporters. Or doctors. Or about the accident.

"It's always like pulling teeth to get him to talk," says Richemont, who is completing a residency in trauma surgery at the University of Arizona.

Ask the 4-foot-10, 86-pound youngster if he's tired of being grilled by reporters and you get an affirmative grunt.

Ask him if he thinks a lot about his accident and he half-shrugs, half-mutters "yes." Ask him if it bothers him, and you get no reply.

"He won't talk about it to anybody," says his mother. "He just says, `I fell.'

"I don't think he realizes what really happened. And I've tried to explain it to him." She says she thinks he views it as "OK, I fell, it's over with."

Amanda Stiner says Justin was, and wasn't, a daredevil before his accident.

"Whatever he wanted to do he pretty much did it. He loved to climb. He was always climbing. Ever since he's been a baby, learning to walk, he's climbed. And now you can't even joke with him about climbing."

But back on Veterans Day, it was different.

Justin, then 8, was playing at the home of George and Gertrude Howard, grandparents of a friend. He decided to climb onto the roof.

In the yard, threaded steel poles stuck out of the ground, staking the Howards' gardenias.

Justin slipped, later telling doctors "it was like falling in slow motion," and became a cushion for a massive pin. One of the half-inch-thick rods broke his fall.

With his feet pointed toward the ground, the rod plunged into his abdomen above his navel and below his breastbone. The rod tore its way through the bottom of his heart's right ventricle, exiting through the top of that chamber, skimming within millimeters over the aorta and pulmonary arteries.

Had it pierced either, he would have bled to death in minutes.

It slammed through the thymus gland and ripped the right interior jugular vein diagonally, severing it. It skimmed off the carotid artery but did not leave his neck.

Justin dangled on the pole, about 2 feet off the ground, for about 20 minutes before Sierra Vista paramedics snipped off the rod without disturbing the 18-inch section inside his body. The boy was awake and alert the whole time. He did not cry.

"He was kind of shook up, but we were able to calm him down and he was just fabulous all the rest of the way," says Sierra Vista-Fry Fire Department paramedic Larry Townsend. "He was scared and it hurt, there was no doubt about it. But there he was talking to us, asking us to please pull it out. He never went into shock."

Richemont remembers Justin being "calmer than I was . . . like, `Oh, hi, there's a rod in my chest and surely you're gonna take it out, right?' He was very matter-of-fact, truly."

He says he had the feeling that the boy "wasn't thinking `I'm gonna die.' He's thinking, `Man, mom's gonna really get mad at me for this one.' "

Richemont says Justin was a polite, quiet, "stoic kid."

Older sister Nicole, 12, inside the house when he fell, was nearly a basket case - and suffered nightmares for a time afterward. So was their mother, who had been in Tucson and arrived at the Howards' house to pick up her children only to learn that Justin had fallen on a rod and had been taken to a Sierra Vista hospital. There, she learned he had been flown to Tucson.

As friends drove her to University Medical Center in Tucson, they kept talking, trying to calm her. Justin's surgery began 10 minutes before she got there.

In the chapel, she "kept asking God to let him live and let him grow old."

Richemont said the significantly lower blood pressure on the right, venous side of the heart accounted largely for the lack of bleeding. "But inside, we're all going, `C'mon, man, nothing? No blood?' It's pretty lucky," Richemont said.

Another factor was that the rod was threaded. "The holes that it made were so clean and the heart actually was sealed around this thing," he added. "It had contracted down around the thread."

Weeks later, the Sierra Vista City Council honored firefighters, paramedics, technicians and policemen for helping save Justin. Amanda Stiner recalls that going to the ceremony, her son said, "If I'd realized where that rod was, I would have really cried."

Amanda Stiner says that before Justin was "spontaneous. See a tree, climb it. Now, he'll be playing outside, and he'll stop and maybe think about what he's supposed to be doing, and he'll walk away. I think common sense comes in and takes over now."