Despite Tragedy, Family Holds Hope Trickles Haven’t Given Up On Son In Coma

In Chris Trickle’s world, improvements are measured by the flick of an eyebrow, the movement of a finger. It’s a good day if he nibbles the cherry Popsicle his parents tenderly feed him.

On bad days, Chris silently fights fevers, pneumonia and infections. Therapists dress him and sit him in a chair to keep fluid from collecting in his lungs.

Before he was moved to a California hospital, Chris’ racing crew would come by regularly and talk to him about the latest race or how his blue No. 70 car was running.

Each time, they’d leave Chris with the same message, like they would if he had just won a NASCAR race.

“You’re the man, Chris. You’re the man.”

Chris doesn’t respond. He can’t. For three months he has been in a deep coma, the result of a bullet that hit him between the eyes and tore through his brain as he drove alone on a freeway. The shooting remains a mystery.

His parents, Chuck and Barbara, have sat by his bedside, hoping for some sign, some miracle.

“We believe he’ll wake up and talk to us,” Chuck says. “He just fights so hard. We’ve raised him 24 years and we know what he’ll do next.”

In the morning, Chuck might suddenly break into tears while making coffee. Later, seeing the peaceful look on Chris’ face in the hospital, Chuck somehow gets the strength to be hopeful again.

Deep inside he knows the dreams he had of Chris becoming a big-time race car driver like Chuck’s brother, NASCAR Winston Cup racer Dick Trickle, have been shattered. He knows the damage that has been done to his son’s brain. He’s heard doctors tell him that Chris may never wake up.

Still, he refuses to give up hope.

“He’s smart, he’s strong and he’s beautiful,” Chuck says. “God didn’t mean for this to happen. He’s going to come back 100 percent.”

If only Chris had been hurt while racing, his parents might be able to find some solace. Born into a racing family, it was his life from the time he was big enough to ride motorbikes.

He was good enough to work his way up to the NASCAR SouthWest tour, where he had nine top 10 finishes last year in his blue Chevy Lumina. Fellow drivers voted him the tour’s most popular driver.

In the win-at-all-costs world of race car driving, Chris stood out as a genuinely nice guy. Dark-haired and good-looking, he was the All-American boy who seldom had a bad word for anyone and never seemed to lose his temper.

“I want to be seen as being fair and someone who races hard,” Chris said in the July 1996 edition of NASCAR Truck Racing magazine, framed in his father’s office. “But I won’t race dirty. If it means being second, then I’ll be second.”

He was tough, though, and focused.

His parents talk about the time he was 12, when he tore an artery and his arm was paralyzed for six months and in a brace. His father changed all the mechanics of his motorcycle to the right-hand side and taped Chris’ useless left arm to the handlebar during races.

“He wasn’t as fast as everyone else, he couldn’t do the turns fast or the jumps high,” Chuck recalls. “But everyone applauded him as he crossed the finish line. He had such guts.”

At 24, Chris had a sponsor, a racing team and a pair of race cars. He was on the verge of making it to the big time.

Then, a month before the biggest race of his life in front of home fans at the Las Vegas Speedway, everything changed.

Chris had dropped off his girlfriend, Jennifer, after eating at an Italian restaurant the night of Feb. 9, and was on his way across town to play tennis with a friend. He used his cellular phone to call him at 9:10 p.m.

A few minutes later, on a darkened freeway overpass, someone shot Chris between the eyes. He was already unconscious as his white convertible careened off the road, crashing into a road sign.

A hitchhiker who saw the car on the side of the road flagged down a bus, and one of the passengers happened to be Dr. Sandra Clancey. She crawled through some barbed wire and made her way to the car.

“He’ll never make it,” she thought to herself, cradling Chris’ head in her arm.

Clancey, a California trauma physician, and her husband were in Las Vegas to show the city to some friends from England.

They went to the Las Vegas Strip after the ambulance took Chris away, and Clancey went straight to the bathroom at the New York-New York hotel to wash the blood from her clothes and hands.

She tried to play some slot machines, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“Someone’s momma is going to be crying tonight,” she thought to herself. “Someone’s momma and daddy. I just feel so sorry for them.”

The knock at the door in the middle of the night by two police detectives was any parent’s worst nightmare. Clancey had helped save Chris’ life, but by the time the Trickles got to the hospital, a nurse told them there was no hope.

“But he’s still breathing,” Barbara said. “He’s still alive. Maybe you won’t do something but someone has to.”

Doctors didn’t want to operate, saying there was little that could be done. In desperation, the Trickles turned to Lonnie Hammargren, Nevada’s lieutenant governor and a neurosurgeon who honed his aggressive tactics while treating brain wounds as an Army surgeon in Vietnam.

By the time Hammargren flew from the state capital of Carson City and looked at the scans of Chris’ brain, the swelling in his head was getting worse.

“If we do surgery he’s got maybe a 5 to 10 percent chance of living,” Hammargren told the parents. “You’ve got 20 minutes to decide.”

He operated for three hours, removing a blood clot and small bone and bullet fragments. The next day, Chris’ brain swelled and Hammargren had to operate again. This time he removed 5 percent of the brain and part of the skull plate, along with the major bullet fragment.

Some 40 friends and relatives cheered when a nurse came to the waiting room to say the bullet had been removed.

“From that point on we had faith that Chris would make it,” Barbara says. “He’s a fighter.”

Police don’t know what kind of gun was used to shoot Chris and have no clues. They’ll probably never know who shot him or why, unless a $35,000 reward offered by the family and friends gets someone to talk.