Community rallies around a school principal paralyzed in a freak accident
Kevin LaCoste remembers falling.
The 41-year-old elementary school principal had climbed a tree in front of his home in Westford on a July day to see whether his children would notice. He’s a goofy dad, and he wanted to surprise them before their family outing.
The kids noticed him almost immediately. He remembered wanting to climb just a little bit higher after that, reaching for one more limb, pulling himself up just a little more. But he lost his grip.
In the first moments after the fall, his wife, Ali, rushed over to comfort him, saying he just had the wind knocked out of him. Then he stopped breathing.
Kevin woke up in a hospital bed, feeling trapped. He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t move.
His brain created a strange kind of “virtual reality” to help him cope. “I felt like it was a game and that I had to try to get out of the game,” he recalled. “It was a game that I was unable to walk.”
It would be a couple of few weeks before Kevin understood the extent of his injuries. He was paralyzed from the chest down. His brain was unaffected, but he could no longer use his arms or legs.
Up until that point, Kevin said, everything in his life had been about determination and hard work. He’d fallen in love with education and risen to the position of principal with the goal of making kids enjoy school. But he couldn’t persuade his brain to send the right signals to let him move his limbs. All of the will in the world can’t fix a spinal cord injury, he said.
Kevin has hope that he’ll regain movement someday. The doctors tell him there’s no way to predict what will happen. But for now, he’s trying to adjust.
“He sees this as a new chapter in his life,” his sister, Lori O’Donnell, said. “It’s going to look a lot different than the chapter he lived before, but he sees this as his second chance.”
He now uses a wheelchair that he can control with his chin, and a more souped-up version is on its way. But it’s difficult to watch other people take care of him, he said. He used to be the family cook, and now he can’t even help wash dishes. He used to love to run, and now seeing runners makes him sad.
“I’m grieving every single day in some way,” he said.
Kevin is putting all of his energy into various therapies and learning his new routine. He hopes to go back to work the next school year.
As he began learning to cope with his new reality over the summer, “LaCoste Strong” T-shirts, bumper stickers, and more were cropping up all around Westford. And a slightly bigger project was in the works.
Nancy Cook’s grandson Jake knew Kevin well — he’d been sent to the principal’s office more times than most kindergartners at Robinson Elementary School, she said. But despite those trips, he loved Principal LaCoste. After Kevin’s fall, Jake told his grandmother he wanted to help.
What started out as a dinner raffle and fund-raiser quickly ballooned into a more ambitious project. Nancy wanted to renovate the LaCostes’ home to make it wheelchair accessible, and she was determined to get it done before he returned from the hospital. She’d never even met the LaCoste family.
“The contractor said to me every day: ‘Nance, you know this is a six-month project, right? Six months,’ ” she said and laughed.
But Nancy knew all of the right people, it seemed. The team she built finished the renovations in 29 days.
She got the word out on Facebook, and offers to help came rolling in. An architect stepped up to design the home. He thought of everything, Nancy said. They built a ramp to the home and even one out to the fire pit, a place Kevin loves. The floors were tiled and heated because people with spinal cord injuries often have trouble regulating their body temperature. They even widened the doorways of the kids’ bedrooms so he could still kiss them goodnight.
A Bedford man who had never met Kevin volunteered to do the demolition. A builder sent his clients a letter telling them what was happening and spent the next few weeks working on the LaCostes home for free. Plumbers and electricians swung by after their normal business hours. Nancy texted a man she knew who does foundations, and two days later he was at the house pouring a new one.
Teachers who worked at Kevin’s school came every day after classes let out to help with the home. Two first-responders who cared for her him on the day of the fall came back to help with the renovations. People delivered three meals a day to feed the workers and then came back at night to help clean up the site.
Against the odds, the house came together.
“I might have used up all of my favors in the last 29 days,” Nancy joked.
The first thing Kevin did when he arrived at the new house was make his peace with the tree. He didn’t want it cut down, he said; it was a part of his family’s home. After confronting the place where his life changed, he went inside.
“I didn’t have any words. I was at a complete loss,” he said. “It was the exact renovations that we hoped to accomplish, you know, in 15 years time.”
Although Nancy just wrapped up this marathon of a project, she’s not finished. She’s now raising money to help pay the LaCostes’ mortgage to take some of the financial pressure off them.
Donations can be made by writing a check to Kevin LaCoste and mailing it it to P.O. Box 869 in Westford or making a Venmo payment to Nancy at Nancy-Cook-25.
Kevin said that of all the surprises the new home held, the biggest one was the sign they hung above his bed, one displaying the words that have become his and Ali’s mantra over the past few months.
“You & Me,” it reads, “WE GOT THIS.”
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