There is a giant bloodstain under the carpet inside the sanctuary of Freedom Baptist Church in rural Ranburne.
The blood is Billy White’s. The stain on the wooden subflooring, which White helped install, was left by the giant pool of blood that flowed from every spot on his head that it could after he fell 18 feet and landed on his face. He broke each of its 14 bones, among other things.
That was the afternoon of June 5, 1997 — the day the trusses fell.
Twenty-something surgeries later — he lost count — White, a member of Northport Baptist Church, stands outside in the bright afternoon sun June 12, 2008. His surroundings are familiar. He’s at a construction site, 50 yards away from that 11-year-old stain, taking a break from the installation of framing, flooring and trusses for Freedom Baptist’s new family life center.
White should be dead. He should be paralyzed. But he’s not. And he’s not angry.
“People would come and ask me that all the time,” White said of the questions like “Aren’t you mad at the Lord?
Here y’all were doing a good deed, and you come away like this.”
His answer is still “no.”
“I’m not mad at the Lord,” he said. “I’m just glad He took something Satan took for evil and protected us through it because we’re all alive. He used it for His glory.”
White was one of 17 from Northport Baptist volunteering a week of his time to help the new Cleburne Baptist Association church build a sanctuary. It is something a group of about 20 men from the Tuscaloosa Baptist Association congregation do each year, traveling across the state to wherever God leads, wherever there is a need for a construction team.
In June 1997, there was a need in Ranburne. The team gathered in a circle before heading out, asked God for safety and success and then hopped in the vans. It was Sunday afternoon.
By Thursday afternoon, only 20 of the 132 roof trusses were left to install, which required lifting them by crane and fitting them together just right. Each truss was 12 feet high by 50 feet long and weighed hundreds of pounds, and when the trusses began to crack, they made a sound just like the one Bill McDonald’s father always warned him about.
“My daddy was a coal miner. He always told me that the worst thing in the world you can hear in a coal mine is the sound of cracking timbers because you know there is probably going to be a cave in,” said McDonald, who organizes Northport Baptist’s annual construction trips. “That’s what it sounded like. I heard those timbers about to crack, and we knew it could only go one way.”
McDonald, who has told this story hundreds of times, recalls being on the ground and running the opposite way.He doesn’t remember how far he got before a truss slammed into his face and chest. He just remembers that once it did, he curled up and waited to die.
A few seconds and 44 toppled trusses later, McDonald was still alive. “It was the domino effect. I kept waiting for the rest of the trusses to fall on me, but the good Lord just stacked them up around me like a bird cage. I never got hit by another one.”
He was bleeding heavily from the cut on his head and from his broken nose and hurting from the broken ribs and broken finger he didn’t yet know he had. But all McDonald could focus on were the groans of the others he knew had to have been injured as well.
With the nearest trauma hospital about 25 miles away in Carrollton, Ga., McDonald knew his professional expertise as the director of sports medicine for the University of Alabama would be needed — and he was right.
Including himself, eight men were seriously hurt: six from Northport Baptist and two from Freedom.
One had a fractured pelvis. One had a compound fracture of the femur. Still another had a compound fracture of the femur that tore through his skin. One had shattered his heel into a million pieces.
Byron Sprayberry, a Northport Baptist member, had been knocked from the top of the trusses and was skewered through the leg upon falling onto a metal reinforcement rod, which eventually lodged in his chest. It would have punctured his lung had it not deflected off a rib.
And then there was White and all that blood.
McDonald remembers the look in each man’s face. “I went around to each one of those guys. I still see their faces. They weren’t screaming. They weren’t hollering. There wasn’t a question of ‘Lord, why did this happen to us? Here we are volunteering our help and this happened.’ There wasn’t fear.”
Still McDonald was afraid some might not make it.
But about that time, “the good Lord sent an ambulance with a paramedic,” he said. Sprayberry made it.
Everybody made it. Not only did Carrollton’s Tanner Medical Center have the exact number of emergency bays available — seven — but there also just happened to be the perfect mix of specialty doctors on duty who could specifically treat every injury.
“By all rights, I should’ve died. Everybody should’ve died. But the Lord didn’t want anybody to die. He protected us,” McDonald said.
When Jackie Taylor, Freedom’s pastor at the time of the accident, visited the men in the hospital that Friday and told them that the church was thinking of calling off the building project, he got an earful. “Every one of the guys that was injured said, ‘No, do not shut down this project. We came here for a purpose. We came here for a reason. We don’t know why this happened but it happened. We need to finish the project,’” McDonald said.
New volunteers from the church and around the Ranburne community were back at work on Saturday. The following year, the Northport Baptist construction team returned for the new building’s dedication.
And when McDonald recently heard that Freedom was breaking ground on a family life center, he gave church member Tommy Whaley an unexpected call.
“They were looking for a job, and we were ready to go,” said Whaley, who was there the day the trusses fell but was uninjured.
McDonald said many members of Freedom remember what happened and wanted the team to return just to fellowship with them.
“But the reason we came back is because God sent us here for a purpose, just like He did back then,” McDonald said, adding he doesn’t know the reason the accident happened but he does know a lot of good came out of it. “People we didn’t even know heard about and started praying for us. Our congregation grew closer together because of the accident. So did theirs.”
And Freedom is just thankful for the assistance, both then and now. According to McDonald, by assisting with the construction of the family life center, the 18 Northport Baptist volunteers likely helped save Freedom $25,000 in labor costs.
“They’ve just been nonstop. The way they’re working us, we might be ready next week,” said Darryl T. Jones, Freedom’s pastor. “They’re a great group of guys, and it’s just an incredible story. I mean Billy White had his whole face crushed, and he’s out here toting plywood.”
White wipes his sweaty brow. He points to his face, noting it has metal plates in it “here, here, here, here and here.” His jaw was wired shut for three months. Both of his arms were also broken in the fall.
“The doctors told me that God had been in it, because I should be dead or at least paralyzed from the neck down the way I hit the floor,” White said. “I was up on the trusses. I heard the crack but by the time I heard the crumbling, I was gone.”
And now he’s back.
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