Neal McAfee Jr. hasn’t yet traveled to exotic places since receiving an electrical wheelchair spruced up with a special device for handicapped hunters.
But the Lake Stevens man has taken1 trips to places that have been so far out of his reach: his back yard to play with his children and his daughter’s friend’s house.
“I can’t walk with her, but I can be with her in the wheelchair and drop her off,” McAfee said.
McAfee received the electric wheelchair from the Seattle-Puget Sound Chapter of Safari Club International and the Seattle Sportsmen’s Conservation Foundation. The groups have members throughout Snohomish County.
The wheelchair is equipped with an adaptive device that allows people with limited mobility to shoot a gun.
The groups raised about $8,000 to buy the wheelchair, which has enough power “to pop a wheelie,” said Kevin “Woody” Woods, president of the Safari Club.
Woods said the clubs wanted to do what they could for McAfee, 39, a former board member who had to stop attending meetings because of a crippling disease.
“It seemed like a good use of our money and a good project,” Woods said. “We support hunting rights and conservation, and support the youth quite a bit. We have our hands in a lot of things.”
Woods said McAfee went from a healthy guy to a guy in a wheelchair in less than a year.
McAfee was a Snohomish County Corrections officer hired in 1990 to transport prisoners from jail to court. After three years, McAfee was transferred to a booking job, responsible for getting inmates booked into their cells.
One day, a drunk became aggressive and knocked McAfee backward. McAfee, who at 6 feet 1 inch was bigger than his attacker, didn’t want to fall on the inmate and injure him, so the officer bore the brunt of the tackle, landing on his shoulder on the concrete floor.
“I saw a pool of blood on the floor and I worried that he hit his face or head,” McAfee recalled. “Then I saw my knee and elbow were bleeding and realized the blood was actually mine.”
Surgery couldn’t help, and in 1998 the doctors told McAfee he had a “frozen left shoulder.” In addition to his shoulder injury, McAfee had earlier been diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis. That disease eventually spread through all his joints, his toes, feet, ankles and hands, fusing his fingers together like a claw. McAfee said it was the stress of the shoulder injury and fighting for years to be compensated by the county that exacerbated the disease.
Before his injury, McAfee had hunted for almost 20 years, traveling as far as Africa. But it wasn’t the thrill of the hunt so much as it was the adventure of seeing new places that kept him hunting.
“Seeing a grizzly bear in the wild … if you are just a tourist, these are things you’d never see,” McAfee said.
After the shoulder injury, McAfee took a short break from hunting, and then developed a type of hunting tripod called “shooting sticks” he had seen in Africa to help him hold his rifle while in a wheelchair. But after the arthritis set in, he had to stop hunting altogether in 2002.
“The arthritis really set into my hands, crippling my fingers and knees,” McAfee said. “The arthritis made it impossible.”
McAfee used a manual wheelchair until June 12. On that day, members of the hunting groups presented McAfee with the electric wheelchair, done up in a camouflage fabric.
McAfee said he had tears in his eyes.
“It’s given me freedom, now I can be out in the yard,” said McAfee who along with his wife, Elizabeth, have three children. “I have mobility and now I can run around with my kids.”
Assistant City Editor Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3097 or goffredo@heraldnet.com.
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