Producing stories for Personal Journeys requires reporters and photographers to spend great lengths of time with their subjects. Some take months to complete. In the process, we can’t help becoming invested in the lives of those who generously share their stories with us. Based on the emails and phone calls we receive nearly every week, so do our readers. So as the year ends, we are revisiting some of our most memorable stories to find out what happened after we packed up our notebooks and cameras.
The fragile optimism myself and now-fiancé, Jason Massad, held going into 2014 shattered less than three weeks into the New Year.
In January 2013, Jason fell four stories from the balcony of our Dunwoody apartment. He broke both ankles, smashed his heel and fractured his skull, requiring emergency brain surgery and months of rehabilitation. He also fractured his C1 and C2 vertebrae — an injury that frequently results in death or paralysis.
Miraculously, Jason survived. He wasn’t paralyzed. His brain function and short-term memory loss eventually improved.
But his crushed heel suffered infection after infection. He underwent surgery after surgery. The specter of amputation loomed large.
Then last January, Jason underwent a successful surgery to reconstruct his shattered right heel, and the orthopedist gave him the OK to begin physical therapy. It seemed a joyous end to a traumatic year.
Finally, we thought, our nightmare was coming to an end. Jason scheduled his physical therapy; we got dressed up and went to a nice restaurant to celebrate.
Two days later we were back in the emergency department at Atlanta Medical Center in total disbelief. The infection had returned.
Multiple surgeries followed to remove more infected tissue and bone. Then came a series of terrifying blood infections and a rigorous regimen of intravenous antibiotics administered at home. We spent countless more hours in waiting rooms and doctors’ offices. Jason found himself confined to a wheelchair once again.
Still, 2014 has been a year full of blessings amid the fear, stress and frustrations.
On Valentine’s Day Jason proposed to me in front of the beluga whales at the Georgia Aquarium – my favorite exhibit in one of my favorite places. He got out of his wheelchair to bend down on one knee, the vacuum pump around his waist whirring quietly as it whisked away fluids that posed a risk of infection to his surgical wound.
I knew then we would be OK.
Jason will never again have full function of his foot. He’ll likely always have a slight limp and endure chronic pain. The infection could reappear at any time and bring the threat of amputation with it.
But Jason showed me the night he proposed that all of those challenges won’t stop him from moving forward in his life. They won’t stop either of us.
But it’s the memory of a day in early October that remains most vivid in my mind as I think back on our year.
The air was crisp and sky a dazzling blue. Trails of wispy clouds hovered above the trees lining our favorite camping spot in the North Georgia mountains near Clayton. Before Jason’s accident, we spent every weekend we could backpacking in those mountains, but we hadn’t been camping in nearly a year.
Jason was wearing a pair of boots I had bought him just weeks before his fall. To our complete shock, they fit. It’s a feat we never thought possible given how much Jason’s foot — which I sometimes refer to as “the Frankenstein foot” — had swollen. The doctors had warned us he may have to buy two different sizes of shoes from now on.
And on that fall day in the woods, Jason walked. It wasn’t far, but he walked. He walked without crutches, our blond terrier, Wally, tagging along.
It was amazing.
Afterward, his foot became painfully swollen from the effort. Jason still uses his crutches daily and his wheelchair when the pain and swelling become too severe.
Still, that day filled me with hope. We know the infection could return, but we have a renewed sense of optimism with a tad dose of superstition.
I haven’t stopped knocking on wood.
Misty Williams, mwilliams@ajc.com
Patrick Whaley was mentally drained and emotionally exhausted when he stepped into the spotlight on the TV show “Shark Tank.”
The founder of Titin, a Sandy Springs-based company that produces weighted compression shirts for maximizing fitness workouts, was nearly broke after buying out his investors. He was forced to turn away customers who coveted his product.
But as he strode onto the set one afternoon last summer, he took a deep breath and prepared himself to seize this golden opportunity. If he could impress the wealthy investors on the hit ABC show, they just might grant him the funds he needed to get his company back on solid footing.
Whaley ripped off his pale blue dress shirt to don the black garment, weighing 8 pounds.
“I am here to show you there is a better way to train. The only question left is which one of you sharks can keep up,” he said with a big smile.
Almost immediately billionaire Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, interrupted him. “My BS meter is going through the roof,” jabbed Cuban.
For the next two hours, the 27-year-old entrepreneur was grilled about his product. It was grueling. But Whaley isn’t the type to give up. Not when grade-school teachers told him he would never make it through college. Not when friends scoffed at his invention. And not on a night in May 2009, when Whaley, a Georgia Tech student at the time, was shot and robbed in a parking deck. The bullet came within an inch of Whaley’s heart, and he lost 60 percent of his blood.
TV viewers would only see a 10-minute slice of the segment, and the judges seemed surprisingly harsh, using words like “jerk” and “arrogant” to describe the polite Eagle Scout. Still, Whaley managed to keep his composure and scored big on the show.
Daymond John, founder of FUBU clothing company, offered Whaley $500,000 in return for 20 percent of his company, and Whaley accepted. The ultimate deal improved significantly after taping, with John agreeing to double his investment.
Whaley said he and John talk almost every day, typically communicating between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m.
“Patrick is the real deal, Titin is the real deal,” said John via text, adding he wears a Titin top around his office and during his workouts.
John has given Titin a major boost. The company is on track to sell between 16,000 and 20,000 items of weighted training gear by the end of this year.
At John’s urging, Whaley plans to move the headquarters to New York City next year.
“Life gives you adversity at every turn,” says Whaley. “It’s really up to you to take that adversity, challenge it and overcome it.”
Helena Oliviero, holiviero@ajc.com
Fredi Alcazar Dominguez can breathe more easily now. His Cobb County family’s future is less uncertain.
Dominguez was getting ready for his senior prom at Pebblebrook High School in 2009 when he got into a minor traffic accident. The police arrested him after discovering he didn’t have a driver’s license and then turned him over to immigration authorities. They held him in to an immigration detention center in a remote part of South Georgia for nearly two months before deporting him to Mexico, a country he hardly knows.
Dominguez, who was brought to the U.S. illegally as a child, risked his life to return to his family in Georgia, first floating on a raft across the Rio Grande and then riding atop a truck from Laredo, Texas, to New Orleans. Another traffic offense in 2012 landed him back on the path to deportation. But the government freed him after family, friends and his attorney rallied around him and fought for his release.
He was granted a temporary reprieve from deportation in February after his harrowing story was featured in Personal Journeys. Dominguez also was granted a temporary work permit through the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He is among 19,009 people living in Georgia who have been accepted into that program.
Dominguez’s two brothers recently received the same relief, and his mother may qualify for a sweeping plan President Barack Obama announced last month to shield up to 5 million immigrants from deportation. A Mexican native, she is now gathering records to prove she meets the requirements, including proof she has lived in the U.S. for more than five years and that two of her sons are U.S. citizens.
Together, these developments have lifted a huge weight off Dominguez’s shoulders. He recalled listening to Obama’s White House announcement as he drove home from work last month.
“It really made my day when I heard that news,” he said. “I was really excited. I was like, ‘Yes, finally.’”
Now 24, Dominguez continues to live with his family in South Cobb. He manages a cellphone store nearby and is saving for college. He recently bought a used Toyota Camry and relishes the freedom it gives him. Last month, he attended a retreat with other immigrant rights activists in the mountains of North Carolina, where he went horseback riding for the first time. He wears a big grin in photos from that day.
On Thanksgiving Day, Dominguez posted a heartfelt message — in English and Spanish — for his friends on Facebook.
“Thank you for being part of my life and thank you for everything you have done for me,” he said. “If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here.”
Jeremy Redmon, jredmon@ajc.com
Robert Currey visited the smoky ruins of the statuesque Hancock County courthouse the morning it burned last August. It was a total loss and a metaphor, perhaps, for the further demise of one of Georgia’s poorest, blackest and most racially charged counties.
But Currey, who made a late-in-life commitment to help save the county, saw something else in the tear-streaked faces of his neighbors. Hope.
“Everybody liked the courthouse, so the sense of loss was uniform and really heartfelt,” said Currey, who founded Atlanta’s trend-setting Storehouse furniture. “In some ways it brought the community – black, white, Republicans, Democrats, the rich, the poor — together for a purpose, for a common cause.”
Currey, profiled last March in Personal Journeys, and wife Suzy bought a circa 1840s Greek Revival mansion in Sparta in 2002, lovingly refurbished it and moved full-time to the rural county 100 miles east of Atlanta.
Retirement isn’t in Currey’s DNA; gardens and greenhouses filled with kale, Brussels sprouts, onions, turnips and all manner of salad greens fill two backyard acres. An old furniture factory across the street was transformed into an indoor mushroom farm. The vegetable bounty ends up in Atlanta restaurants, farmers markets and Whole Foods. Six locals have been hired.
Currey, 74, will erect another greenhouse down Elm Street this spring for peppers, eggplants and tomatoes. Organic foods boost eco-tourism and healthy lifestyles, both lacking in the nation’s 23rd poorest county. Last spring the Curreys laid in a garden for kids enrolled in a local Head Start program.
“These little kids see that when you put seeds in the ground, they grow,” Robert said. “At the very least they’ll learn that Coca-Cola doesn’t really make milk.”
He chairs the local food bank. This year’s Currey-sponsored Labor Day picnic brought together more than 400 black and white Spartans. The Curreys will, yet again, march up front during the county’s Emancipation Proclamation celebration on New Year’s Day. They’re also planning another community-wide day of service in January to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Hancock County Democrats asked the irascible Robert to join a committee this year. So too did the county’s club for Progressive Democrats, a signal that Hancock’s old-line black leadership is warming to Currey. They had been at odds over newcomer Currey’s attempts to bridge Sparta’s deep racial divide.
“I don’t know whether you call it progress or not, but I was happy I was asked,” he said.
One morning last spring, Currey fainted and fell down the stairs, breaking his nose and a big toe. The hospital visit, though, proved beneficial: Doctors discovered an irregular heartbeat and installed a pacemaker.
Oh, and the courthouse will be rebuilt.
“The opportunities, both positive and negative, I’ve experienced here have made me a better person,” Currey said. “But what defies logic is why more people like me don’t come to places like this and try to do something positive.”
Dan Chapman, dchapman@ajc.com
In 1974, Atlanta Constitution editor Reg Murphy was tricked into getting into a car with a mysterious man and ended up bound in a car trunk and held hostage for two days until a colleague delivered a satchel of cash to free him. Six hours later William A.H. Williams was arrested and the money recovered. He was convicted and served nine years for the crime.
I interviewed Murphy in his spacious home on a St. Simons Island golf course for a Personal Journeys story timed to the 40th anniversary of his kidnapping. Life had been good to him since his release. His fame and smarts helped catapult him to success. But I could not find William A. H. Williams.
After the story went to press, but before it was delivered to readers, an AJC editor got a strange call on Feb. 20. It was Williams, now living in Las Vegas. He said he felt compelled to call the newspaper on the 40th anniversary of his crime. He was battling cancer, confined to an apartment and seemed lonely. He talked about the crazy kidnapping caper with bemused detachment.
He said he had been married four or five times, bounced around a few cities but had few regrets. One was he had not seen his daughter, Janet, since his arrest. She would be 43, he figured.
On March 31, I got an email from Janet Scarbary, a mother of four who lived by Macon, saying she had been looking for her father her whole life and saw my story. “Please let my father know I am looking for him,” she wrote.
I did and she called him, almost hyperventilating with nervousness. Later she told me, “I told him how much I had missed him. According to him, he’s mailed letters to me, but I never saw them.”
A reunion in Las Vegas was scheduled, and I planned to tag along as a witness. But then she went incommunicado for a month, causing a befuddled Williams to wonder what happened.
By the time she resurfaced, Williams had been given the grim news that he had just days to live.
In May, his son emailed me to say Williams had died. Louis Williams was born three decades ago when his father was paroled to El Paso. I told him about his sister, who he always wanted to find. They instantly got in touch.
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You couldn’t write this kinda stuff, as our father died and a family is coming together,” Louis said in an email. “I’m sure the old man approves. Now, if somehow we could get her here for the funeral it would be storybook, my friend.”
But then she drifted off and is again out of Louis’ life. William A.H. Williams was buried in a military cemetery.
I recently called Reg Murphy, who played a round of golf that day (he shoots in the 90s) and wrote a newspaper column deconstructing the demise of the Democratic party in the South. He’s working on a book of personal remembrances. The working title? “The Luckiest Man I Ever Met.”
Bill Torpy, btorpy@ajc.com
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