By Rob Schultz
The Wisconsin State Journal
MADISON — Happy endings are rare events for criminal investigators, which is why the photo of Joey Slaight that sits on a desk at the Grant County Sheriff’s Office has become somewhat of a shrine.
“He’s hope,” Sheriff Nate Dreckman said of the 9-year-old boy who is making what some of his relatives are calling a miraculous recovery from a gunshot wound to the head. The shot was fired Jan. 2, 2015, by his mother, Morgan Slaight, a 27-year-old recovering methamphetamine addict who also shot Joey’s little brother, Jaxon, 6, in the head before she shot herself. Jaxon died at the scene — at Morgan Slaight’s sister’s home in Montfort — while Morgan died 11 days later at UW Hospital.
“Usually nothing good comes from tragedies like that one,” Dreckman said. “Joey represents hope that you can survive and move on from it.”
One year after Joey was considered a “goner” when he arrived at UW Hospital with a gunshot wound near his left eye, he’s talking in sentences and he’s running, jumping, laughing, completing puzzles and playing games on his Wii. He continues rehabilitation at a pediatric facility located within a few hours of his relatives’ homes near Tulsa, Oklahoma, according to his aunt and guardian, Andra Munoz.
“It’s just amazing. I can’t wrap my mind around the things that he’s doing,” said Munoz, who is the older sister of Joey’s father, Tyler Slaight. She has been asked by Tyler and the rest of the Slaight family to speak on their behalf.
Joey’s recovery has baffled neurological experts at UW Hospital who predicted that Joey would never become a functional person, Munoz said. While he’s developmentally disabled and most likely will stay that way because of his struggles with basic communication skills, nobody is putting a ceiling on how far Joey will progress, she added.
Munoz said she also was told by medical staff at a hospital where Joey was transferred near Oklahoma City that dramatic recoveries following serious brain injuries usually slow after the first year. But Joey’s recovery is continuing to go so well one year after the shooting that Joey’s health care service, Sooner Care, just gave its OK for him to spend six more months at the pediatric rehab facility. “If he was plateauing they’d cut off funding immediately,” Munoz said.
She added that Joey’s recovery was aided by a strong contingent of people from Wisconsin that included neurosurgeon Dr. Joshua Medow and other doctors and nurses at UW Hospital; Madison Police Chief Mike Koval; Grant County Sheriff’s detectives, and administrators and well-wishers from all over the state who continue to send cards and gifts.
“If we hadn’t had the people of Wisconsin, it would be a much different situation,” said Munoz. “They have continuously let us know that they are behind us and that they love us, and it has made such a difference for our family. All we want is for people to remember and to know Joey is fighting and to know how far he has come.”
High-Risk Treatment
Morgan Slaight grew up near Dodgeville but had lived in Oklahoma for several years and had three children before she left her husband and moved back to Wisconsin in 2014. Morgan and Tyler were both recovering meth addicts and, at one point, lost custody of their children.
Police say she was living with Joey and Jaxon in Montfort — 16 miles west of Dodgeville — at the home of her sister, Rana Corkum, when she threatened to commit suicide on Dec. 22. She was sent to Winnebago Mental Health Institute near Oshkosh that day on an emergency detention. She was released and sent back to Corkum’s home the day before the shooting, police said. Her youngest son, Charlie, 3, who has a different father, was living with relatives at the time.
After the shooting, Joey and his mother were rushed to UW Hospital. As teams of medical personnel worked furiously to stabilize both of them, Medow said, some surgeons backed off on operating on Joey because they believed the injury was going to prohibit his ability to recover any quality of life.
He said he stepped in after his heart told him to try and save Joey.
“I don’t believe that physicians save lives. I believe that’s God’s work. But I think we all have the ability to make lives better,” said Medow, 42, who is the hospital’s director of neurocritical care. “What I think we did to make his life better was to take his skull off at the time and that allowed the pressure in his head to go down and the blood supply to be restored to that part of the brain.”
Joey was in surgery for less than an hour, Medow said. A bullet from a .22-caliber handgun entered Joey’s left frontal lobe near his left eye from point-blank range, and the bullet fragments that caused most of the damage to his brain lodged in the floor of the skull. He said he didn’t try to remove the fragments lodged in Joey’s skull because “you would do more damage to the brain than you’re actually going to help it.”
Afterward, Joey’s body temperature was lowered and he was given a drug called pentobarbital that slowed his brain activity. “That meant his brain required a lot less energy and we gave him a number of days in a medically induced coma so he could try and recover whatever it was he could recover,” Medow said.
The strategy is risky for children because other organs are affected by the drug, too, and their livers aren’t mature enough to metabolize the drug, he added.
Since the injury occurred on the left side of the brain — or the dominant hemisphere — Medow was most concerned about Joey’s speech, language, memory and motor skills. “But on the other hand, he’s a kid so you take your chances,” he said. “There’s always a chance that the right side will take over.”
Meantime, Joey’s father, grandmother Randa Slaight and aunts Maggie VanDaley and Munoz arrived in Madison on Jan. 3 and tried to make sense of what was happening. They were met at the airport by Koval, who went to college with one of Joey’s great-uncles, Munoz said.
“(Koval) jumped right into the whole mess. He picked us up at the airport, took us to the hospital, he helped us navigate through all the media,” Munoz said. “He was a major part of us that first night there. We had never been to Wisconsin in our lives. We had no idea what we were walking into or what we were doing and he was just wonderful.”
They sat in the hospital next to the seemingly lifeless boy, who didn’t move a muscle for days as doctors pulled him out of the coma and his body slowly ridded itself of the pentobarbital. But on Jan. 12, Medow got some good news when he received a text message from an unknown number that said Joey had grabbed the wrist of a nurse who was trying to brush his teeth.
“When I got that text, that’s when I knew he was going to wake up,” Medow said. “My response was, ‘I don’t know who this is texting me but I hope that whatever happens will be for the best. I need to dry my eyes now. Be well.’”
Support, And Hope
Grant County Sheriff’s chief deputy Jack Johnson and detectives Rick Place and Craig Reukauf were lauded last year by the Wisconsin Victim-Witness Professional Association for their work on the Slaight case. They also have been affected emotionally by Joey’s recovery.
Six weeks after the shooting, Joey grabbed Johnson’s hand while they were visiting the boy in the hospital. “Things like that I’ll never forget. It was a touching memory,” said Johnson, a 28-year law enforcement veteran who is driving to Oklahoma next week with Place to visit Joey and his family.
Medow got more emotional on Feb. 17 when he received another text from the nurse, who wrote that Joey had begun singing, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” That had followed the news that Joey had begun to say a few words and could respond to questions appropriately with a yes or no.
“That was interesting because your singing voice usually comes from your opposite (right) side,” Medow said. “Left side is language. Right side is generally intonation and changes of voice. That’s where musicality comes from.
“So, to me, it wasn’t just that he was able to sing, he was able to speak and understand and had a memory and that had to come, at this point, from his left temporal lobe. Could it have all transferred to the right? It’s possible.”
Joey was given the green light in late February to transfer from UW Hospital to the Children’s Center Rehabilitation Hospital in Bethany, Oklahoma, so he could be closer to many of his relatives’ homes. Before leaving, Munoz said she was told by pediatric neurologists at UW Hospital that Joey probably wouldn’t improve much more.
“They were trying to be real with us scientifically on what we could expect,” she added. “That was fair. That’s what we wanted. They told us they didn’t want to tell us something that would get our hopes up. But Joey has just blown that all away. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s totally God.”
In June, Joey had the piece of his skull that was removed by Medow during surgery put back in place in Oklahoma City. He was then moved to a pediatric facility that is teaching Joey basic skills like letter recognition and how to blend sounds. “That’s when he started going off the charts with his improvement,” Munoz said.
Hard Road Ahead
Joey’s family, who has worked tirelessly to make sure he is getting funding from health care services for his medical needs, is concerned about his future, Munoz said. “The next phase is finding out how we’re going to get help when he comes home,” she said.
Munoz is grateful for all the support Slaight has received from people in Wisconsin. Despite her busy schedule tending to her own four children, including 2-year-old twin boys, Munoz set up a to keep people informed. It also includes an address to which people can send cards and gifts that Joey needs for his rehabilitation.
As it stands now, Joey will live with Munoz and her family after he leaves the pediatric rehab center. The ultimate goal is for him to live with his father, who is still trying to stabilize his life, Munoz said. “He has a goal to get Joey with him full time but we don’t know exactly when that will be,” she added.
Joey has not been told about the shooting or why his mother and little brother are no longer with him, Munoz said. He and Jaxon were very close, a bond forged as Joey looked after his little brother while their parents struggled with their addictions, she said.
“That’s what is so hard about this,” Munoz said. “I know Joey misses Jaxon so much. I know he knows he’s not there. We know that has to be addressed at some point, but we’re not going to rush this.”
She added that Joey has shown signs of emotional effects from the traumatic shooting. He recently told his grandmother to remove a 2014 photo she had of his school class.
“He kept saying, ‘Bad day, bad day, change it,’” Munoz said. “We still don’t know what that means. But he does remember something, obviously. I don’t know how much, but I believe he knows something about what happened that day.”
Medow said his efforts to help Joey were easy compared to what Joey has ahead of him.
“Every step of the way, you’re hoping and you’re thinking to yourself, ‘I hope that anything that I have done will not only keep him around but give him some sort of quality of life afterwards,’” Medow said. “You hope he lives into his 70s, 80s and 90s. You hope that not only with the physical stuff, that he’ll be a functional part of society and have friends and family and be with people who love him the rest of his life. And you have to hope that he’s able to psychologically deal with the events that led up to all of this.
“My aspect was probably the easiest because it was about human physiology and anatomy and that’s it. All the stuff that’s going on from now on, during his rehabilitation, physically and psychologically is a lot harder.”
He’ll most likely battle through it much like he has the past year, Munoz said.
“We’ve been privy to so many miracles. There’s no other way to explain it,” she added. “It’s beyond any anniversary sadness we have. We have strong faith that we’ll see Joey continue to grow.”
Copyright 2016 The Wisconsin State Journal