13-year-old boy paralyzed after trying to escape wasp at community pool

Today, Anya Camper is praying for a miracle to happen and allow her son Semyon “SJ” Williams Jr. to walk and use his arms again. It all went wrong on June 20, the first day of summer, when SJ and his friends wanted to go to the community pool in Frisco, North Texas.

What happened was about as horrible an accident as you could imagine. “Basically, him and his friends were just playing wasp chase and he ran away and dove into the pool,” Anya said, as covered by KTVT.

She describes her son as an avid swimmer, but the footballer’s skills in the water couldn’t help him when he apparently jumped into the shallow end. “He doesn’t know exactly what dive he did,” Anya noted, adding that her son only has one memory of the fateful accident.

All he remembers is coming to on his face at the bottom of the pool, taking in water and not being able to move. Not at all. “He couldn’t move. He was literally drinking water. So it’s hard to hear,” she said of the moment for SJ. “He literally said to me, ‘Mom, I thought I was going to drown because I couldn’t move.’”

SJ was rescued from the pool by a friend and rushed by ambulance to Children’s Health Dallas. After a battery of tests, the family learned he had fractured his neck and torn his spinal cord. He had surgery on June 21 for his neck, but he may never regain the use of his body.

Dr. Bruno Braga, a pediatric neurosurgeon at the hospital, said KXAS In Dallas, SJ fractured his 4th and 6th cervical vertebrae, as well as parts in front and behind the spinal canal.

“The fact that he has no motor or sensory function below the level of the injury, it’s not a good indication that he’s going to recover much, but it’s too early to say and we just have to wait and see,” Braga told the outlet.

“Quittraplegic – when he said those words, it was a different kind of feeling,” Anya said of what doctors told her.

“You hear about things like this, you see things like this, you never expect it to be your story until it is,” Anya told KXAS. “When it comes to your front door, it shakes you, that’s exactly what it did for us.”

But SJ’s grandfather, Louis Camper, said the family is not giving up on SJ’s future, but they are also being realistic. “The reality is it’s a long road. It’s going to be a marathon for us and we have to support him and be with him every step of the way,” he said.

“It touches the heart. At 13, you’re just starting to live, you know,” he continued. “So we’re true believers. And it’s not over until God says it is.”

For now, SJ’s mother has taken a leave of absence from her job to be by her son’s side. “We pray and believe that God will work a miracle,” she said, “that he will work a miracle on my son because he has a lot more to live.”

If SJ’s prognosis doesn’t change, everything will have to change for the boy and his family. In the meantime, Anya says she feels helpless. “As a mother, it’s heartbreaking because, like I said, I really want to feel helpless,” she says. “He’s counting on me to fix this. And that’s one thing I can’t do. I can’t fix this. So it’s hard.”

A GoFundMe Campaign was set up by SJ’s brother, Louis, where he shared that on the eighth day, SJ had passed his swallowing exam and could now begin eating normal foods and drinking normally. In his description of the events, Louis praised SJ’s friend, writing, “If one of his friends hadn’t realized he wasn’t ‘just floating’…my mother would have planned a funeral.”

With nearly 1,000 donations already, Louis’ fundraiser on behalf of his brother SJ has raised more than $56,000 of its $100,000 goal, as of this writing.

SJ remains at Children’s Health, with the hospital saying they are unable to determine at this point how much longer he will need to remain in their care.