It was a Sunday afternoon when Charlie Moore saw a dead woman rise.
On the morning of April 18, 2004, Moore climbed in the car to return home to Mississippi from a weekend church retreat in Alabama. Riding with him were his wife, Judy; his friend Jeff Morland; and Morland’s wife, Robin. As they left, Morland remarked how amazing it would have been to see Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead.
That afternoon, as the group was passing through Tuscaloosa, Moore missed his turn off U.S. Highway 82 so he kept going. In front of him was a large Ford truck; its driver had missed his turn as well.
As they crested a hill at about 60 mph, a small white Toyota driven by Kristy Shelby — who also had missed her turn — pulled out of a parking lot onto the highway in front of the truck. Both drivers later said they never saw each other.
“The driver of the truck didn’t have the chance to hit his brakes,” Moore recalled.
The truck broadsided Shelby’s car, annihilating the driver’s side as they both crashed to a stop.
Moore and Morland rushed to the scene. As they approached Shelby’s mangled car, they found her unresponsive, slumped over the steering wheel with the windshield on top of her.
Then they saw her children. Her son, Cody, 8, and daughter, Abigail, 4, were in the car, screaming and covered with glass. Fearing a fire, Morland pulled Cody out immediately, but the seat belt on Abigail’s car seat had tightened from the crash and couldn’t be released. Morland cut the belt and pulled her from the car as Moore pried the windshield off Shelby, who couldn’t be removed from the driver’s seat.
“I reached through the window and caught her by the arm,” Moore said. “I couldn’t think of anything else but to pray.”
Morland, an emergency medical technician, checked Shelby’s vital signs. She had no pulse. Because of where she was trapped, he was unable to perform CPR.
“He looked up at me and said, ‘Brother Charlie, I think she’s gone,’” Moore recalled.
“Is my mother dead?” Cody asked before pleading, “Please don’t let my momma die.”
Moore continued praying. Soon a nurse pulled over to the wreck. Crawling into the car, she affirmed Morland’s assessment — Shelby was dead.
The truck’s driver and passengers were dazed but avoided serious injury. As firefighters attended to Shelby’s children, a doctor arrived. While Moore stood next to Shelby praying aloud, the doctor checked her for vital signs.
“She’s gone,” he pronounced.
As the doctor walked away, Moore thought of Shelby’s children. He looked into her eyes, open yet lifeless, eerily bulging from her head. Desperate, he cried out to God.
“Please don’t let this woman die,” he pleaded. “If she’s dead, bring her back for her children’s sake.”
When Moore finished his prayer, he looked down at Shelby once again. The dead woman turned to meet his gaze.
“She’s alive!” he screamed. “She’s alive!”
Emergency personnel scrambled to cut her from the car. It took 30 minutes. Shelby was rushed to Tuscaloosa’s DCH Regional Medical Center with a faint pulse and grievous injuries: a back broken in three places, a lacerated liver, a ruptured spleen, collapsed lungs, a broken collarbone, several broken ribs, swollen internal organs and a pelvis that was utterly crushed.
Her husband, Butch, had just gotten off work when he received the news.
“My dad came to bring me to the hospital,” he recalled. “He said, ‘Kristy’s been in an accident.’
“I said, ‘How bad is it?’ He said, ‘Son, let’s wait.’”
At the hospital, as soon as the surgeon cut Kristy open, her spleen fell out in his hand. She was bleeding internally and her liver was lacerated to the worst level of severity. She flat lined on the table but came back as the surgeon struggled to keep her alive.
Unable to stop the bleeding, the surgeon delivered a crushing prognosis to Kristy’s family. Kristy, who now required a ventilator to breathe, was in dire condition. Even if she survived, he didn’t know if she would have any brain function left. Her only hope was an emergency airlift to UAB Hospital in Birmingham.
Butch suddenly faced the shock of possibly losing his wife. He thought of their children, what he would tell them if their mother died.
“I knew [Kristy] was strong, but at the time, I didn’t know what to expect,” he said.
The Shelbys’ church, New Hope Baptist Church, Berry, canceled its Sunday evening service as members flocked to the emergency room. In the hospital’s prayer chapel, about a dozen church members, including Butch, gathered to pray for Kristy.
“I can remember us praying that whatever the Lord willed, we were going to accept it,” he said. “I know things happen for a reason.”
Max Stripling, director of missions for Sipsey Baptist Association, was pastor of New Hope Baptist at the time. He recalls an especially powerful sense of the Holy Spirit in the room, assuring them Kristy would be all right.
“There was just a special anointing on the prayer service that night, an assurance that God was not only there but He had heard and was going to answer the prayers of the people who were there,” he said.
That night, Kristy was flown to UAB by helicopter. She flat lined three times on the way as paramedics performed CPR.
When Kristy arrived, doctors sewed up her liver as best they could and labored to stop her internal bleeding. They rushed to pump blood into her body as quickly as she lost it, eventually replacing her entire blood volume.
After the surgery, Kristy’s organs were so swollen that doctors could not sew her up. They placed a protective plastic covering over her organs and moved her to the intensive care unit. Doctors were pessimistic about her chances, saying she would probably end up in a vegetative state.
But as Kristy lay in a medically induced coma, her internal bleeding gradually stopped. Doctors watched in shock as her brain, which showed no function the first two days, gradually improved. Her colon, which had not been working properly, began to heal. Her pelvis, crushed beyond saving, was replaced with a metal one, although doctors still said she would never walk again.
About two weeks after the accident, the swelling in Kristy’s organs had gone down enough for doctors to sew her up. The ventilator was removed in favor of a tracheotomy, with a tube bigger than a half dollar inserted into her throat. Doctors said she would never speak above a whisper again.
Three weeks later, Kristy woke up.
“I knew I was in a hospital because of the way it looked, but I didn’t know what it meant,” she recalled.
Kristy, whose last memory was of driving with her children, wondered where they were and to what new reality she awoke.
“The nurses and doctors were telling me, ‘You shouldn’t be here. You died.’ I thought, ‘You’re joking, right? I don’t remember any of this. I want out of this bed now.’”
Butch was at work when Kristy woke up, so her parents explained everything to her. As doctors conducted a series of movement tests, they were amazed. She could move her arms, legs and feet.
After the tracheotomy tube was removed, Kristy’s voice, just a whisper at first, began to strengthen until she could speak audibly again. She even gradually started walking; hospital staff members were stunned when she was finally able to walk through the front doors.
“They were just in shock that I could even remotely do this,” she said.
At first, Kristy didn’t want her children to see her in such bad shape. But as she began to recover, she was ready for them to come. Cody refused to believe she was getting better so she called him. But she didn’t anticipate how different her recovering voice would sound.
“This is your mom,” Kristy told Cody. “How are you doing?”
“You’re lying to me,” he replied. “This is not my mother.”
Distraught, Kristy told him he could come see her. When Butch, Cody and Abigail arrived at the hospital, Cody was still uncertain. Kristy had lost a lot of weight and didn’t look the same. She assured him she was all right.
“You were dead,” he said. “They told me you were dead.”
Still skeptical, Cody asked to see her doctor, who confirmed that his mother was doing fine.
Six weeks after being pronounced dead, Kristy was released from the hospital. Her recovery was so rapid, she didn’t require any additional rehabilitation; her only lingering injuries are scars from surgery and persistent back pain. Because of the internal injuries she suffered in the wreck, doctors told her she would probably never have children again. Her 3-year-old son, Jon David, proves otherwise.
There wasn’t any debt from Kristy’s hospital stay; a fund set up in her name at her bank paid for everything.
But the blessings since Kristy’s car wreck have not been limited to her.
Butch said the wreck helped him realize that life is fleeting. Now he focuses more on his family and faith.
“I never once questioned God (because of the accident),” Butch said. “It served as a wake-up call; He does things for a reason.”
Kristy said she is more active in sharing her faith now than she used to be and people have come to Jesus through hearing her story. Among them is the driver of the truck that hit her. She sees God’s purpose in the lives that have been changed through her tragedy.
“When I woke up in the hospital, I questioned the Lord,” Kristy said. “I asked, ‘Why did you do this to me? I have always been faithful to you … .’ I see now it was for other people to see.”
As Butch looks back, he is grateful for the members of his church who ministered to him and his family. “You can thank them but they don’t realize what they really were until later on, that the support we got was just tremendous,” Butch said.
Kristy said after she died, she didn’t have any experiences such as seeing Jesus or visiting heaven; she only remembers a recording of her children singing gospel music played by a radio above her hospital bed.
But what Kristy’s brush with death and the years that have followed have shown her is the power of God, who she is confident still heals the sick — and raises the dead.
“I knew there was a God, but I didn’t know how real He was until this happened to me.”
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