11 Years Of Pain End For Both Mother, Son

Judy Hamlin refused to watch her son die a second time.

She knew little Dusty was gone April 12, 1985, after rescuers pulled his limp, 2-year-old body from rushing Rathdrum Creek. He was gray and convulsing after 15 minutes under the frigid water.

Doctors tried to revive him for three agonizing hours.

Knowing he was gone, she wanted the efforts to stop. “I kept saying, ‘Stop,’ but they wouldn’t,” Judy says, still bitter her pleas were ignored. “God knows, they didn’t do him any favors.”

Dusty lived for 11 more years, but as a prisoner in a body he couldn’t control. He made sounds but couldn’t talk, couldn’t walk and struggled to breathe. He died two weeks ago in a foster home in Cheney.

“I knew he was dying,” Judy says, biting her lip. “That was one reason I put him in foster care.”

Dusty was the youngest of Judy’s four children. He was a bright-eyed, easygoing toddler who learned quickly and loved to make his family laugh.

Judy lived adjacent to Rathdrum’s city park and had warned her children about playing near the unprotected creek by the play area. Spring runoff turned the peaceful trickle into a deadly torrent.

Dusty couldn’t resist the park the second spring he could walk. On April 12, he followed his sister to the play area. The creek swallowed him before his playmate’s eyes.

When Judy discovered her children were gone, she ran into the park barefoot. Dusty’s friend told her Dusty had drowned. She jumped into the creek after him while neighbors cut through town to a sump area 500 yards from the park. That’s where they found him.

His body temperature had dropped to 78 degrees. He didn’t respond to CPR. Machines breathed for Dusty for a week.

Doctors said Dusty’s brain was so damaged from lack of oxygen that he’d never walk or talk again. Judy was so relieved her son was back from the dead that she knew doctors were wrong. But they were right.

“He was always deteriorating from the time he came home,” she says. “His body was twisted, deformed. It was like he lived in one huge charley horse.”

Judy left Rathdrum for Spokane, then Deer Park. She filed an insurance claim against Rathdrum that turned into a lawsuit that went all the way to the state Supreme Court.

The insurance company finally agreed in 1990 to pay Dusty $340,000 over 20 years. Judy says he received $150,000 after lawyers were paid and the state took enough to reimburse Medicaid for his medical care.

Judy took Dusty to specialists and explored alternative programs that pushed vitamin diets. She taught him to eat and swallow again and exercised his stiff limbs. She repositioned him every two hours around the clock and changed his diapers.

“He’d go into seizures at the slightest touch, but I kissed him all the time,” she says, laughing. “By golly, he got used to it.”

A year after the accident, Judy enrolled Dusty in her public school’s preschool program for handicapped children.

He still suffered from 100 seizures every day and sitting in his wheelchair made him cry from pain. The exposure to every illness children carry was dangerous to his weakened system. But he loved the attention and people loved him.

To get Dusty whatever he needed in school, Judy waged a war on paper. She wrote letters for more aides, reliable transportation, emergency training for his teachers. Some issues took years to resolve, but Judy wasn’t one to give up.

Until 18 months ago. Within a few months in 1995, Judy’s life fell apart. A home purchase dissolved, then her marriage to Dusty’s stepfather crumbled. She found herself marooned in a trailer home on Deer Park farmland with no money.

Dusty was 12 but functioning at an infant’s level. Judy had rejected doctors’ suggestions that he undergo spinal surgery. Her boy’s suffering depressed her and his care exhausted her. And she could see in his eyes that he was slipping away.

On her 39th birthday, Judy put Dusty in foster care through Child Protective Services. He was dehydrated and underweight. She hoped the state and a foster family could give him the care he needed.

She visited him three times at the foster home. He was awake for only one visit.

“He yelled at me for 45 minutes. It was hard,” she says, her eyes focused on the floor.

Dusty died from heart failure on Father’s Day. For the funeral, Judy made a photo collage of Dusty as a beautiful baby, sitting with Santa, playing with his kitty, arched and tense but smiling in his wheelchair.

She grieves for her son because she misses his love. But his death has brought her peace.

“A great relief has come over her,” says Judy’s fiance, Karl Fausett. “She has suffered so much.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo