On the evening of June 6, 2019, Erica Edwards’ husband, Shannon, was taking his two daughters – Emma, 7, and Shaylie, 3, – to the park. However, not long after they left she heard sounds that made her stomach turn, causing her to rush outside.
“I ran out back, looked over my fence and right in my vision was Shaylie on the road,” she told Fox News.
A car had hit both Shannon – her husband – and Shaylie. As the vehicle was coming, Shannon lifted Shaylie out of the way, but he took the direct hit. The impact caused Shaylie to fly 40 feet before hitting the pavement, breaking her jaw, neck, femur, and sacrum. The impact also causes Shaylie to have severe brain trauma.
Shannon had to undergo complete facial reconstruction surgery requiring titanium plates to be put in his face.
Erica immediately ran outside and performed CPR on Shaylie with a bystander until paramedics arrived.
It was a long road to recovery, but Shaylie has defied the odds, now 6, and in the Spring of 2022, she graduated from kindergarten.
“This kid was just meant to do something amazing,” Shaylie’s mom, Erica Edwards of Reno, Nevada, said.
“I was a very spiritual person before this — I always believed in God, but I [wasn’t] much of a churchgoer, not much of a follow-the-Bible-to-the-book type of person,” she said.
“But I’m a full believer now … God speaks to me all the time. And it was through this accident that this voice came to me.”
“It was a lot of just, ‘Stay calm, just stay calm,’” she said. “It has to be a higher power, a God, a somebody who was just kind of grounding me for what was to come.”
“If it wasn’t for that grounding, I wouldn’t have gotten through the last three years of fighting to get my baby back, because it has been a literal fight every single day.”
When Shaylie was four years old, doctors evaluated that she was at the level of a five-month-old. However, after months of hard work, Shaylie got her ability to eat, talk, and walk (with the help of a walker).
“So many steps were involved in doing that,” Erica said of Shaylie’s therapies. “The list is amazingly huge of all the work her therapists did.”
Today, Shaylie is still in therapy, but she continues to improve.
According to the Reno Gazette Journal the woman driving the vehicle who hit Shannon and Shaylie was found guilty of two counts of reckless driving, which are misdemeanor charges. The driver did not do any jail time but was given 100 hours of community service and ordered to pay a $2,000 fine.
Erica and Shannon did attend the sentencing hearing.
“It was important for us to be there for my husband, who felt a lot of guilt after the accident thinking he could have done something more to stop the car or get Shaylie out of the way,” Erica said.
Fox News | Reno Gazette Journal
