Citizens Hourly News

Police paint marks a spot on the quiet, two-lane stretch of asphalt that leads into Okefenokee Swamp Park south of Waycross, Ga.

The unknowing would call it an accident scene.
Chip Sasser  calls it a crime scene.

It was at that spot on Aug. 18 that fellow bicyclist Mike McCollum  was struck as he warmed up for a group ride into and out of the park. Sasser had just parked near the end of the entrance road, gotten his bike off the rack when a man drove up in a Buick with a caved-in windshield.

“He just pulled up and said, ‘I just hit one of your riders,’” Sasser said.

Sasser and two other riders sped the short distance down the highway and found McCollum, 46, lying in the road. EMTs took him to Satilla Regional and he was airlifted from there to Shands Jacksonville with a serious head injury and a broken fibula, said his father, Bud McCollum, a retired physician.

After getting the frightening call, McCollum and his wife, Carolyn, rushed south from Bath, Ohio, where they were camping in their motor home.

“We were afraid we wouldn’t get here before he died,” the father said.
But when they got to Shands, he was off the respirator and talking but with some pretty bad memory problems.

“I said, ‘Michael. Do you know who we are?’” McCollum said. “He said, ‘Yeah. Virgil and Carolyn.’ I go by Bud. He knew who we were. He didn’t know we were his parents.”

Still, he’s gotten better daily and was undergoing intensive rehabilitation at the Shepherd Center, a catastrophic care hospital in Atlanta. He will be in the hospital until Friday and then undergo outpatient therapy for two to three months, during which he can’t work or drive, his father said.

“This is going to be a life-changing thing for him,” Bud McCollum said.
And not just for him.

Sasser and the other riders from Waycross had found about the safest place in the county to ride. They’ve been riding that stretch of road every Wednesday for decades. They had seen that white Buick pass often with its driver, David Edgar Swain, 65, on his way to work as night security at Okefenokee Swamp Park. Now he’s charged with driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol. He is free on bond.

Sasser and the other riders will see the police paint on the roadway and on a tree where McCollum’s bike landed.

Bud and Carolyn McCollum visited the scene a few days after their son’s crash.

Speaking by cell phone, Bud McCollum said, “We’re just standing out here looking at this road. We’re awfully relieved and thankful he’s alive.”

Watching his wife, Bud McCollum said, “Carolyn just found his cycling jersey where it was cut off of him. She’s going to lose it. She already has.”

Just about everyone who rides a bike on a road gets squeezed to the side by drivers too impatient to slow down a few seconds to let a car in another lane pass. They know what it’s like for drivers to steer straight toward them just for the fun of it. It’s hilarious, the first 80 times or so.

McCollum was hit from behind. Now they’ll know what it’s like to get chills when they hear a car coming from behind them on the Swamp Park road.
Mike McCollum has a daughter, 25, from his first marriage, and he and his wife, Morre,  have three sons, 14, 12 and 10.

Mike and Morre McCollum will likely endure the frustration of his memory lapses that will continue awhile. Friends figure he will fume over not being able to drive and work at an Atlanta broadband company, work that brought him occasionally to Waycross, where he had ridden with the cyclists four times before.

The law says bicyclists are entitled to the road. A lot of drivers figure anything without a motor shouldn’t be on the pavement.
Drivers should give bicyclists room to ride.
Otherwise, they could change a lot of lives in an instant.

“Cycling for us is just a love and a passion,” Sasser says. “One of the first liberating experiences as a child is learning how to ride a bike.”

They’ve kept it as adults, but they’ve lost some of that sense of freedom to fear. It’ll take awhile to get it back.

Jacksonville Local News – Jacksonville.com and The Florida Times-Union