On Aug. 7, around 11:30 a.m., Jaci and Jarvis Brill were on their motorcycles waiting at a red light near Rapid City on their way to a restaurant in Sturgis when the driver of an eastbound SUV turned right to go south, crossed two lanes and clipped Jarvis, knocking him to the ground and into a nearby car, and collided into Jaci head on.
“I jumped up off the ground and was going to go after the guy because he was sitting there. When I jumped up and I turned, I (had) seen that he’d hit my wife head on with his SUV, and I heard her screaming,” Jarvis said. “So I ran to her aid and told the guy to back his car up because he was on top of my wife.”
Jaci, who never actually hit the ground, was sitting on her tipped-over motorcycle sideways. Her head and arms had no injuries, but her legs had been slammed into a Ford F-250 pickup that had been parked behind her.
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The impact had ripped skin from the top of her thighs to past her calves, “exposing muscle, bone and tendon,” according to a GoFundMe page for her.
“We sat there waiting for the paramedics. She was screaming in pain,” Jarvis said. “I was just holding her, telling her to stay awake, don’t fall asleep, and I’m rubbing her sternum, tapping her, trying to make sure that she stays coherent as much as she could, but she was losing a lot of blood. A lot, a lot of blood.”
When the paramedics arrived, they had to extract her from the truck and motorcycle, using airbags to lift the truck up off of her. She was raced to the hospital in Rapid City and received four blood transfusions in the initial surgery. Once she was stabilized, she was given five more transfusions.
She was in the ICU for 11 days before being moved to a regular room. She is still at the hospital, and has averaged about three surgeries a week since the accident, many of them skin grafts.
Jaci, along with her husband Jarvis, are the owners and operators of the Finishline Café in Gering. The little restaurant located behind the Gering Domino’s is only 30 by 22 feet and holds 48 people. They’ve been running it — just the two of them — for 11 years. He cooks, she waits tables. It’s their only source of income, and it’s been closed since the accident.
“It was just me and my husband running our restaurant, the Finishline,” Jaci said. “So now the door’s locked, and I got signs on the door just because a lot of my people, they don’t do Facebook or computers, so Amanda (their daughter) made us signs and stuff. And everybody’s like, ‘Oh my god, we miss the restaurant.’ It’s been rough.”
It didn’t take long for word of the horrific accident to reach Paul Reed, who owns the café building and has become like family to the Brills.
“He and all of his associates and his friends, they all pretty much come here and eat breakfast … all their people come in every morning,” Jarvis said.
He, along with another family friend, Kristy Petersen, who works at Platte Valley Bank, got to work straight away in organizing fundraisers for the Brills.
“What we’re trying to do is just get them enough funds put together so that they can maintain themselves,” Reed said, “… so they can open their business back up.”
The fundraisers include donation buckets at various locations around the Scottsbluff/Gering area, a designated account that can be donated to at Platte Valley Bank and a GoFundMe page.
On Saturday, Aug. 28, Reed hosted a hamburger feed at his garage to continue the fundraising efforts. The event included a 50/50 raffle, auction items and, of course, food. Reed said he gave himself about a week to put the whole thing together, but he’s been putting in the fundraising efforts for longer. He said he’s reached out to businesses and individuals, “people that have the discretionary dollars to work with.”
“We’ve been at it for a while. We’ve got quite a bit together already,” he said. “I’m very proud of the community and their response. I think out of the entire community, I’ve had one company and one individual tell me no, but everybody’s reached out to them, and I really appreciate how good of a community we actually live in, in a time of need.”
Both Jaci and Jarvis said they couldn’t believe the overwhelming support they’ve been receiving throughout the whole ordeal.
“I mean, just instantly, we started getting, you know — people were scrambling to put stuff together for us,” Jarvis said.
Jaci said, “Let me tell you, I didn’t know I had that many friends in this world, because the phone and Facebook and everything was blowing up.”
Even looking to the future when Jaci will eventually get to go home, people have already told them they would be willing to help get the café back up and running. No matter what, the Brills are determined to make it happen.
“Our daughter is going to help us on the weekends. My mom’s going to come down,” Jarvis said. “I’ve got a lot of people that said they’ll come in and wait tables, if they have to or do whatever they need to do.”
Jaci said, “We’re going to do what we got to do. That’s what we do. … Things may change a little, but we’re going to figure it out.”
Jaci said that accepting the help was a little hard for her at first, but now she’s grateful for all that the community has done for her and her family.
“We had never asked for any help ever. And when this first got brought up, we’re like, ‘No, we’re not taking charity, whatever,’” she said. “Then one day Paul goes, ‘Um, you help everybody all the time. Never blink an eye. It’s your turn. Don’t worry about what’s going on here. I got everything under control.’ I said, ‘OK.’”