Stephen King helps accident victims

WATERVILLE -- On Wednesday, Stephen King stepped in to help a 3-year-old girl who was badly injured in a Tuesday car accident in Waterville.

When family members wanted to move Rylee Lagucki from a hospital in Portland to one in Bangor, the horror novelist donated $2,800 to cover the cost of the ambulance trip, including the cost of a critical-care team that rode with her all the way.

Rylee's family had wanted the girl to be near her mother, 22-year-old Stephanie Lagucki of Waterville, who was also critically wounded in the crash. Lagucki is in Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor.

"A social worker from Bangor taking care of Stephanie helped us," said Laura Mathieu of Oakland, Lagucki's cousin. "She pulled some strings, and Stephen King made a significant donation. It's amazing -- this man (King) we don't even know. It's phenomenal for someone to do that."

http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/2245227.shtml

Mods, I'm really not sure where this thread belongs. I apologize if it's not really an LBN thread.

and I hope it stays in LBN so it can bring a smile to more people's faces.

I grew up loving his books and it is nice to see he helps people like this :)

They donate big money to libraries around the state, for example. They do a lot anonymously, as well.

And Stephen shared the stage with John Edwards at the University of Maine during the campaign last year.

Good guy!

:)

Broke his hip, if I recall correctly. Don't recall all the details, but he was a long time in recovery. So he knows what this family is going through.

hit by somebody in a pick-up.

Hmm, that has me wondering if I should contact him and see if he'll at least send well wishes or something to that lady in the accident I saw yesterday . . . . I wonder if I can find an e-mail address or contact info, I'll have to check.

And strangely enough, that man died mysteriously a year or so later. Don't mess with the King.

One of his legs was almost destroyed. He had pins going through the bone from ankle to hip every few inches. His doctor told him when he came in the bones in his leg were so broken his leg was like a sock full of gravel. He wrote a really incredible account of it but I forget where I read it. The guy who hit him was like a two-or-three time drunk driver too.

It doesn't surprise me he's a liberal.

in "From a Buick 8" where a cop standing on the side of the road is hit and killed by a drunk driver. But apparently he had already written this novel before he was hit. I haven't read the last Dark Tower book but I guess he wrote about the accident in it.

:scared:

...now that they're together. And from what I've read about Stephen King, this sort of generosity on his part isn't surprising. He's an exceedingly kind person.

I knew he was truly a kind man, but I have been enlightened as to his generous nature. Not surprised to find out he is a Democrat also!

And he tends to do them with very little fanfare. Sorry for the lack of link, but I read a year or three ago that a librarian wrote him pleading for money for some children's books and he sent her ten freakin thousand dollars, with the note "Get them some good ones." Love him bunches.

And to poster above, yeah, he was hit by a pickup truck. His book On Writing tells all about it, besides having the only section on how to edit fiction that ever really helped me in practice. And he talks about finding out Carrie was about to make serious money going into paperback, and running around the house and then down the street to try to buy his wife a fabulous present--which, at a drug store, turned out to be a hair dryer, something she'd longed for in their brokeness in Maine's cold-ass winters. So cute, a really real guy.

was hit by a drunk driver - badly injured. I wait patiently (or not so) for every book he has ever written (with the exception of the Dark Tower series - just could not get into those)!! King Rocks!

"The Dark Tower" series, but they *are* sort of an acquired taste. I remember when SK was struck by the truck, I thought, "Oh, I hope he doesn't die - he has to finish 'The Dark Tower'!"

I love him, he's probably my favorite modern writer. I don't think he gets nearly enough credit for his ability to tell an amazing story.

Then he finished them... arg.

All of Kings books are not equal, but the best of his books and stories are classics to be. I think it's because even in his weaker books and stories, King has real insight into how everyday people act, talk and think. Because of this, his characters are people most readers can understand, so when all these bizarre things happen to them, the readers are sympathetic.

From Wikipedia:

King was taking a walk after driving his son to the airport, intending to return home to go see The General's Daughter with his family. As he walked up a hill, Bryan Smith, who was driving a Dodge van, hit him, throwing him about 14 feet (4.2 m) in the air. King barely missed the driver's side support post in the van and a spread of rocks on the ground near where he landed; either of which would likely have killed him or put him in a permanent coma.

Unable to get up, King was rushed to a local hospital, which reported that they could not treat him. He was then flown to another hospital; in the helicopter he suffered a collapsed lung. In addition to the collapsed lung, King suffered a leg broken in at least nine places, a split knee, a broken right hip, four broken ribs, and a spine chipped in eight places.



King, 51, was seriously injured June 19 when a light-blue Dodge van driven by Bryan Smith, 42, of Fryeburg, went off Route 5 in North Lovell, a community in Oxford County in western Maine.

Smith was distracted by his Rottweiler, named Bullet, drove onto the shoulder and hit King, throwing him over the van's windshield and into a ditch. King just missed falling against a rocky ledge.

King was walking against traffic, carrying a book titled "The House'' by Bentley Little, when he saw Smith coming toward him. In about a second and a half, King turned a bit to his left to try to get out of the way.

That probably saved his life, officers said later.



Bryan Smith (1953 – September 22, 2000) was the driver of the vehicle which hit the author Stephen King on June 19, 1999. He was brought before a grand jury and was indicted on two counts: driving to endanger and aggravated assault. He said that he was distracted by his dog, which was loose in the van. He pled guilty to driving to endanger, the lesser charge, was sentenced to six months' jail time (sentence suspended), and had his driver's license suspended for a year (he had nearly a dozen previous infractions on record).

In September 2000, Smith was discovered dead in his trailer. His cause of death was listed as an accidental overdose of the painkiller fentanyl, according to toxicology reports. Smith had suffered from a back injury and was prescribed the painkiller not long before his death. Other sources, however, indicate that an autopsy failed to reveal the cause of his death.

It's really quite an amazing feat of metafiction and a true testament to his prowess as an author that he could pull it off while making it enjoyable for the reader. Great guy!

stories. OH YEAH and "The Stand", too...:thumbsup:

I was born and raised in Maine and his good deeds are well known. I believe he even paid for a new little league baseball field in Bangor awhile back, if i am not mistaken.

Here in europe your covered by the health service, were even covered in other countries in the Éuropean union, everyone even the unemployed gets free health care why dont you have that basic need in the US?

an ambulance is no exception. Yeah, why DON'T we have that in the US?

It was convenience for the family...and a choice so the family could be in one place and not in two separate hospitals more than 2 hours apart.

The transport following the accident was by ambulance - or most likely helicopter.

many Americans have lost everything after they have been involved in an accident and have huge medical bills to pay. I refused the offer of an ambulance when I was in a wreck, and had my husband drive me to the hospital, where I was treated for three broken bones.

after a traumatic accident. Years ago when my son was in Children's Hospital ICU with pneumonia, there was a woman there whose husband and baby had been in a terrible car crash. She had to spend part of the day with the child, who was very critically injured, and then drive to another hospital to be with her husband, who was also critical. The husband ultimately died, and the child survived. It was awful.

He can recognize the sheer horror of that.

And the people around where he lives are very protective of his family's privacy. He donates to all sorts of local charities, the libraries, the kids' sports leagues, stuff like that.

was THE most important in his lifetime, and that he considered the Bush Administration to be very dangerous.
Always loved him; even after his last 5-6 novels... lol

I'd advise everyone to read Stephen King's 2005 graduation speech to the University of Maine. I saw it on C-Span ... it was a KEEPER, and it gives you an idea of where he's coming from re: charity.

Read it at:

http://www.stephenking.com/com_address/

Here's an excerpt:

"Give away a dime for every dollar you make. Why not? If you don't give it, the government's just going to take it. You think you can't afford it, one lousy thin dime out of every dollar? If you think you can't, just look at the taxes you pay on every gallon of gas you buy. If you think you can't, look at all the sick, hungry, unhappy, uneducated people standing outside the fence America has constructed around herself, people who only want a little something for themselves and their families. For their children. Very few of them are suicide bombers. Very few of them are Mr. Bush's "enemies of freedom," whether he believes that or not. They might become enemies of freedom, but right now all they want is a little something to get by on. A little chance at the kind of joy most of us are feeling today. A dime out of every dollar.

"And here's a secret I learned six summers ago, lying in a ditch beside the road, covered in my own blood and thinking I was going to die: you go out broke. Everything's on loan, anyway. You're not an owner, you're only a steward. So pass some of it on. You may not have much now, but you're going to have a lot. And when you do, remember the ones that don't have anything. A dime out of every dollar. If everyone did it, maybe we could make Mr. Bush let go of the weapons he loves so well and give some of the money he spends on them back to the farmers, the unwed mothers, and the working poor...."

So not surprising that he did this. He's a kind and generous person.

:loveya:

He's also my very favorite author. He can create a character like no other.

... they've been married since college ... He speaks of her so lovingly in his autobiography/writing book called "On Writing" (which I highly recommend to any King fan -- the audio book is great, too -- he reads his own life story in such an entertaining way -- I've listened to it over and over and over again). He speaks of how he still desperately seeks her approval and her laughter when he writes a new book. She's always the first to read his new work (she's a writer in her own right).

They went through such tough times as a young married couple with three kids in a crappy trailer -- and now that they are rich as Croesus, they give their money away like crazy.

Tabitha staged the intervention that resulted in Stephen getting off booze and coke back in the '80s, and helped him start writing again after that horrible accident (which is described in all its gruesome detail in "On Writing"). The dog in the van of the guy who hit King on the road was poking its nose into a cooler of meat -- the driver was trying to get the dog out of the cooler and wasn't watching the road.

BTW: I love his biweekly column, "The Pop of King," in Entertainment Weekly, too. He's a hoot!

this year, he has his normal holiday lighting, PLUS two massive lighted peace signs decorating the front and side of his house. He is extremely well-known in the area for his generosity, and for his plain talk about what's wrong with our government. He once suggested that the new symbol for the Maine State license plate should be a silhouette of a pregnant teenager smoking. That pissed some folks off! But he made his point.