The accident
Zach Pickett is shown during the early morning hours of Aug. 6, 2012, following surgery.
Photo courtesy of the Pickett family
Pickett said he doesn't think much about the accident. He doesn't talk about it either.
"Only unless someone else brings it up. What happened, happened. I wake up every day and get in my wheelchair. I guess that reminds me."
It was hot that August afternoon. It was closing in on 4 p.m. and 100 degrees.
Pickett and his longtime friends Cooksy and Frankie Kennedy were on break from their lifeguard duties at Cameron Park Lake and dove into shallow water to simply cool off.
"Just like they and hundred of kids have done 100 times before," Tod Pickett said.
Kennedy and Cooksy pretty much belly-flopped in. But Zach lowered his head into a diving motion and the crown struck a sandbar submerged in the shallow murky water. It took little force to crush his seventh vertebra and damage his spinal cord forever.
"I don't remember much of it," Zach said. "I lost all movement, I know that. I remember being face down and then getting moved sideways so I could breathe. From there, it was all a blur."
Zach Pickett with his mother, Judy, and father, Tod.
Photo by Todd Shurtleff
For his parents, it was a vivid nightmare. Cooksy, who helped stabilize Zach along with Kennedy (some say they saved his life), called Judy, who rode in the ambulance with her son to UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, a 35-minute haul.
Tod, who was working at his sports memorabilia store in Placerville at the time, got the call from Judy and took the longest hour drive of his life to Sacramento.
"It was horrible," he said. "I had little information. I tried to think positive thoughts. I cried a lot. I remember thinking ‘This can't be happening.'"
Not to Zach. Not at 16. He'd just got his driver's license and the day before had earned his Eagle Scout award. He was closing in on all of Brian's swim times. He was a straight-A student with his whole life in front of him.
But the Pickett family had faced adversity before. Plenty of it. When Zach was 6 months old, Judy was diagnosed with breast cancer. She fought through it, but it came back twice more by the time Zach was 6. She fought it off twice more and the Rolling Hills Middle School physical education and life fitness teacher has been cancer free for 12 years.
"It's all he's known his whole life, that his mom had cancer," Judy said. "Maybe it's given him some extra strength."
