LYNNWOOD — After a long day at work, Kevin Warner needed to run some errands.
He picked up last-minute Valentine’s Day cards for his kids and their teachers. He stopped to browse bicycles for his son, Cash, whose sixth birthday was coming up. It was about 10 p.m. on Feb. 13, 2014.
Warner, 40, was on his motorcycle, just blocks from home. He saw a car blow the stop sign to his right. He figures he had a second, maybe a half-second, to make a decision. He hopped up from his motorcycle seat, moving his right leg to avoid a direct hit. He heard a bang as the car collided with his bike. The moments that followed are a blur.
He remembers tumbling, then lying in the middle of the road. He heard voices and saw faces and somehow, someone called his wife, Amy.
A bystander appeared above him. She told him not to move, to focus on her face and to keep breathing until help arrived. That woman showed him such kindness, and so have so many others since the crash, Warner said. He counts the investigator, Lynnwood police officer Stephen Showalter, among them.
It’s kindness, and the love of his family, that has helped Warner push through a lengthy healing process and ongoing criminal case.
Showalter, a longtime traffic officer, said he’s learned on the job that a little bit of compassion can go a long way.
Last month, Warner wrote a letter of thanks to Showalter that he sent to Lynnwood Police Chief Steve Jensen. The letter ended up in the mayor’s hands, too. Showalter didn’t set out to get any attention for doing his job, but Warner wrote that the officer gave him a sense of calm and a sense of community.
Showalter “made me feel like he was genuinely concerned about my health, and shared in my frustration over the situation,” Warner wrote.
“His kindness and compassion put my wife and I at ease through what otherwise has been a very difficult and stressful ordeal,” he wrote.
The two men didn’t cross paths at the accident scene. The driver who struck Warner took off. Showalter arrived to collect evidence after Warner was taken away in the ambulance. It was quiet by then. The officer found something else, something personal, on the road among the motorcycle pieces.
Warner’s Valentine’s Day cards and heart-shaped chocolate candies were spilled from his motorcycle luggage bags. They seemed important, so Showalter scooped them up.
“I assumed (the card) was for his wife, and I thought, ‘It’s not going to be a good Valentine’s Day,’ ” Showalter said.
Kevin met his wife, Amy, at the Seattle coffee shop where she used to work. They married in 2006 and have Cash, now 7, and Mazzy, who’s about to turn 4, as well as Steve, the exuberant Goldendoodle.
After the crash, Warner spent five days at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. He met Showalter there when the officer came to take his statement. Showalter talked to him like he was a real person.
“I felt like I was being looked after the way I was supposed to be looked after,” he said.
In all, Warner suffered a shattered left knee cap and a broken bone in his left leg, plus a broken toe on his right foot, a broken bone in his right hand and a dislocated right shoulder.
Daughter Mazzy referred to his room at Harborview as “the boo boo bed.”
Months later doctors found cartilage tears in his left hip and right shoulder. He’s undergone four surgeries and missed three months of work. He’s in environmental acoustics, meaning he offers advice on reducing noise in projects such as factories and road construction.
For months Warner relied on a modified walker to get him moving despite his casts and immobilized left leg. Amy and the kids remember the clicking sounds it made as he crossed the floor. He spent a lot of that time in bed. Mazzy would climb in alongside him, and they took turns making up stories to entertain each other.
Warner knew he had to focus on his healing. He didn’t want to get mired in bitterness over what happened to him. “I needed help with everything,” he said.
Showalter gave him two promises: to remember his name and to keep him updated on the case.
“You were my connection for all that,” Warner told the officer in a recent interview.
The driver who’s accused of causing the crash, a 51-year-old King County woman, was charged in April with vehicular assault and hit-and-run, according to court records.
Prosecutors alleged that she was drunk when she blew a stop sign and hit Warner. A blood test taken more than four hours after the crash showed her blood-alcohol level at .12. The legal limit to drive is .08. The woman has drunken driving convictions from 2002 and 2005. Trial is set for September.
More than a year has passed. Warner feels grateful to be alive, and to have his family and both his legs. He’s given up on motorcycles and taken up bicycling to work. He still can’t kneel or run or skate for a game of ice hockey, but he can play with his kids and work on the house in the Meadowdale neighborhood.
“I’ll get there,” he said. “It just will take a while.”
He still thinks about everyone who has helped him and his family. One friend, a Seattle firefighter, built a wooden ramp for the front door before he got home from the hospital.
The Warners ended up keeping the ramp, all these months later. The kids like it too much for their scooters.
It, too, reminds them of kindness.
Rikki King: 425-339-3449; rking@heraldnet.com.
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