Spencer Shea is stocking shelves at Riverhead Building Supply. He works smoothly, pressing a security tag to each product with careful precision before he finds its place in the aisle. But when he gets to a packaged door handle, he pauses. Brow furrowed, he looks for its home, closely examining the dozens of small hardware products hanging along the aisle.
After several long moments, he sighs. “Nope,” he says, and places the handle back on his rolling cart. “Maybe I’ll remember later.”
Five years ago, Spencer was recovering from a car accident that his doctors thought he might not survive. Now 20 years old, he has graduated from Riverhead High School and works two jobs, despite a brain injury that has presented many challenges along the way.
The injury has slowed his speech, but Spencer is almost surprisingly witty, deflecting serious conversation with an irresistible sense of humor. It is impossible to dislike him; he is sweet, friendly and full of smiles. He is curious and compassionate about others’ lives. He loves when people recognize him on the street.
Here at Riverhead Building Supply on Pulaski Street, where Spencer spends three days a week, he performs a variety of menial tasks in the hardware department. “It’s not too challenging,” he says as he smooths another plastic security label onto a package. He looks up, grinning, and adds, “My favorite part is when they pay me.”
The work keeps him busy, he explains. He misses school, where he got to see his friends and classmates every day. When he’s working, he says, at least he is out of the house and around other people.
His mother agrees. “We kept telling him: You can’t just sit here,” Kathleen Shea says later that day, leaning against the front counter in her downtown clothing store. “When you’re just sitting here, your brain’s not working. You need to get up and do things. Something. Anything. Your brain needs to work.”
‘Your brain needs to work’
Before she leaves every morning, Kathleen sets three alarms in Spencer’s room to make sure he gets out of bed.
“One to make sure he’s awake, one to make sure he’s getting out of bed and one to make sure he’s getting ready,” she says, laughing.
Kathleen and her husband, Michael Shea, both work during the day, so they can’t be there in the mornings to force Spencer out of bed – his favorite place to be, Spencer will tell you with a cheeky grin. So he is on his own getting ready for work, which has made him late on more than one occasion because he sometimes loses track of time and has difficulty starting simple tasks.
This becomes especially clear, for example, when it’s time for Spencer to shower. “He’ll stay in there for hours if we let him,” Kathleen says. No matter how many times she pounds on the bathroom door, she says, Spencer will always be finished “in a minute.”
“And then ten minutes later, he’s still in there,” she laughs.
Spencer takes his showers at night, so that he won’t miss the county bus that arrives at 11:30 a.m. to take him to work. But he sometimes still gets distracted by his iPad, or with staring at the digital clock on the cable box. He likes to know what time it is, Kathleen explains, and sometimes gets “stuck” staring at a clock.
“Like this,” she says, and loads a video on her iPhone from the most recent time she had to drive Spencer to work late.
As they drive, the phone camera is pointed at the car radio, where the time is lit up in red numbers. Taylor Swift blares out of the speakers, and her voice becomes louder as Kathleen presses a button to turn up the music.
The digital clock disappears, replaced by the volume. Moments later, Spencer’s hand sneaks into the frame and hits a button to make the screen display the time again.
Kathleen changes the volume several more times in the video. Each time, Spencer only lasts a few seconds before he changes the screen back to displaying the clock.
“I don’t think he has a good sense of time,” Kathleen says once the video ends. “He just loves to look at that clock. He developed some OCD tendencies after the accident.”
The accident. The phrase slips casually into conversation, especially between family members. It sits like a bottomless chasm dividing the two halves of their lives – before the accident, and after.
Spencer asks about it a lot. He doesn’t remember much from the 12 weeks he spent in the hospital, and he is insatiably curious about every detail from those missing three months of his life. What did Grandpa say when you first called to tell him? he asks his mother. When did so-and-so first find out? What did they say when they first came to see me?
Kathleen took pictures of Spencer every day in the hospital as he slowly regained his ability to speak, walk and eat. Spencer still likes to look through them.
“Mike doesn’t really understand,” Kathleen says. “He asks, ‘Why do you want to go back? Why do you want to see yourself like that?’” She shakes her head. “But I kind of understand. We saw him like that, but he didn’t. That’s why I took the pictures. Because I would want to see.”
Though Spencer cannot remember his time recovering in the hospital, he remembers life before the accident very clearly. And as for the night of the accident itself, Kathleen says, he remembers every detail.
“He remembers everything he did that night,” she says quietly. “He remembers where he sat, what he was drinking – he remembers it all exactly.”
The accident
Kathleen and Michael Shea were sleeping when they got the phone call.
It was January 30, 2010. Spencer was a spirited boy of just 14 years old, popular in his eighth grade class. Two days before, he had had an argument with his parents about hanging out with his older brother, Luke. They forbid Spencer from driving with him. They didn’t like Luke’s lifestyle, they said, and most importantly, they didn’t trust his driving.
Spencer drove with him anyway. That Friday night, he lied to his parents, claiming he was sleeping at a friend’s house. Instead, he ended up partying with his 19-year-old brother and his friends.
Luke was drunk when he sped down Osborn Avenue later that night with Spencer and three other teenagers in the car. Somewhere near Reeves Avenue, just after 1:30 a.m., he lost control of the vehicle. The car smashed into several trees and overturned.
Luke and the other passengers were wearing seatbelts. Spencer, who was crammed in the car’s rear middle seat, was not.
When the ambulances arrived, they found Spencer had been partially ejected from the vehicle. Residents from a nearby house had gotten a bag of frozen peas and were applying it to his head. But it wasn’t until first responders peeled off Spencer’s bandana that they saw the true extent of his head injury.
The frozen peas and the bandana, which acted almost as a torniquet, helped slow down Spencer’s injured brain swelling and likely saved his life, said first responders on the scene.
Spencer actually died on the roadway that night. Three EMTs from Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps brought him back to life through vigorous CPR. When his heart started beating again, they rushed him to Peconic Bay Medical Center, where a helicopter was waiting to fly him to Stony Brook University Hospital.
Spencer’s distraught parents pulled into the parking lot of Peconic Bay just as the helicopter was taking off.
‘A new child’
Spencer’s recovery was long and grueling.
For three months, Kathleen and Mike took turns sleeping in the hospital room with their bedridden child. The “off-duty” parent would stay at home with their other son, Ryan, who was only 10 at the time.
Luke was already behind bars in Suffolk County Jail. He would soon serve a two-year sentence for driving while intoxicated at Greene County Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
For several weeks, Spencer did not even open his eyes. No one knew what his brain injury would entail. His forehead was completely shattered, and he would need a major, 14-hour surgery to repair his facial structure and insert a metal plate into his skull. His brain was pressing right against the skin of his forehead, so when the brain swelling began to subside, it would start to sag.
It wasn’t until about five weeks later, shortly after Spencer had the surgery, when he opened his eyes for the first time.
Kathleen was standing right beside the bed, she recalls. A nurse had been putting eyedrops in Spencer’s eyes when he reached up and pried one eye open.
“We were shocked,” Kathleen says. “We were like, Spencer, can you see us? He nodded, yes.”
Immediately, Kathleen grabbed a notebook and a permanent marker. She wrote “I love you,” on a piece of paper. Then Spencer took the marker and slowly, painstakingly, wrote back:
“I love u too.”
Spencer spent six weeks at Stony Brook, and then six more weeks at St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson, which offers rehabilitation services for victims of traumatic brain injury. There, he would do slow laps around the hallway, kick balls and attempt to walk in a straight line. Before he started speaking again, he would sometimes communicate through a paper keyboard his mother drew onto a piece of paper for him.
Spencer came home April 22, 2010. He would be back in school again that September to start ninth grade in Riverhead. Over the next several years, his progress would continue in smaller, more gradual steps, until he leveled off about a year ago at where he is today.
“Nancy put it best,” Kathleen says, referring to the mother of a Michael Hubbard, a local boy who suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2011. “She looks at it like Michael passed away that day, and I kind of feel the same way. A new child was born on January 30, 2010. The child I gave birth to is different from the child that he is now.”
Life after brain injury
Spencer became a local celebrity after his accident, in large part due to the online following he developed through Kathleen’s regular Facebook updates. Her Facebook page, simply named “Spencer Shea,” has grown to more than 2,200 followers.
One of those followers turned out to be Joe “Buck” Miller, Spencer’s manager at Riverhead Building Supply. Miller had never met any of the Sheas personally, but he followed Spencer’s recovery on Facebook from the very beginning.
“When they told us he was going to come and work here, I got excited,” Miller says, sitting in his office. “Because I knew all about him, and I thought we’d be a good place for him to learn a trade.”
Miller is gentle and patient with Spencer, who sometimes needs to be urged into starting a task or becomes forgetful about where a product might go. But he insists he treats Spencer just like any other employee.
“He’s a pleasure to have with us,” Miller says. “He seems to have no fear. Anything I’ve asked him to do – even setting up and receiving an order – he’s extremely accurate. He hasn’t made any mistakes when he does it.”
In addition to his gig at Riverhead Building Supply, where he started in February, Spencer also does janitorial work on the weekends at a Westhampton condominium complex where his father works.
“I love having him work there,” Michael Shea says in an interview at the Shea household, sitting on a couch across from his son. “I’m just really thankful and grateful for what I have. I know how it could have been, so…” He trails off, looking for a long time at Spencer. “I thank God every day.”
In his spare time, Spencer likes watching Vine videos on his iPad. He took up horseback riding last year. He has a few close friends from high school who he sees once a week or so – friends who got to know him after the accident, Kathleen says.
His popularity carried over into high school, where he attended three proms – (“None of my other kids attended three proms,” Kathleen says, laughing”) – and got an roar of cheers when his name was called at graduation.
“Walking across that stage,” Spencer recalls, “it felt pretty impressive. I was just thinking the whole time, ‘Thank God I made it. Thank God himself I made it.’”
He may never be able to move out of his parents house, but he can take care of himself when they’re not home. Kathleen often dreams about buying a home with a smaller house on the property where Spencer can have at least some independence.
“Of course you wonder,” she says. “You can’t help but wonder. What kind of path would he have taken? Where would he have been today if the accident had never happened? You start thinking, he would be in his first year of college right now… But you can’t do that to yourself.” She gets quiet for a moment. “Who knows – he might have gone down a bad path. This accident could have saved his life. Things are meant to be. I really do believe that.”
As for Spencer, he doesn’t think he has changed very much because of the accident. He is self-deprecating when he talks about himself, but his goals in life, he say, remain the same as before.
“I want to be rich,” he says, sitting on the living room couch, and his parents laugh. But when he begins speaking again, it is in a slow, quiet voice:
“I want to have an easy job that pays a lot,” Spencer says. “I want to find a beautiful young lady that loves me. And I want to have a few kids. Like three kids,” he adds. “One daughter, two sons. All that sounds pretty nice. And then… and then I’ll just live happily ever after.”
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