Former Marquette basketball star asks community to pray for daughter in ICU after Florida car crash

 

MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- A former Marquette basketball star and radio announcer is asking the community to pray for his young daughter who was injured in a car crash earlier this week.

Jim McIlvaine was on a road trip in Florida near Lake Okeechobee, riding in the passenger seat while his wife, Gwendolyn, drove.

Behind her was their eight-year-old son, Kent, in a car seat, and to his right was their 10-year-old daughter, Blythe Darby.

"It was a two-lane road and traffic had stopped. So, we were the last in a row of cars that had stopped, waiting for somebody to turn or something," McIlvaine said. "The driver behind us in an F250 did not see that and got distracted and kind of hit us at full tilt and just demolished the back end of our Cadillac."

McIlvaine himself was knocked unconscious for several minutes and still doesn't remember the crash happening.

Gwendolyn and Kent were left relatively unharmed, with McIlvaine thanking the car seat his son was strapped into.

"You could see the cracking and the discoloration all over the car seat from the impact and that kid walked away without a scratch on him," McIlvaine said. 

But Blythe Darby, while on the outside only seemed to suffer some scratches, was hit hardest -- and has spent the last several days in the intensive care unit.

"She had severe brain trauma, and they did a CAT scan and MRI, and they prepared us for a worst-case scenario where she's in a persistent vegetative state and said she had shearing all over her brain and bleeding on her frontal lobes," McIlvaine said.

Thankfully, Darby is beginning to make some progress and is able to feed herself foods like applesauce.

The family said she is having what could only be described as a "miracle recovery" and they credit the thoughts, prayers, and positive thinking they've received from all over the country. 

"They are each other's best friends, and my son the other night said, this is the first day of my life I've never seen my sister," McIlvaine said. 

According to experts at Children's Wisconsin, road injuries are one of the leading causes of preventable death and injury for kids in the United States -- and when correctly used, car seats can reduce the risk of death by up to 71%.

"When a child is in a car seat, the car seat itself is what is distributing the force of the crash across the entire child's body, so it's supporting their head, neck and spine," said Shanika Kaltenbrun, Children's Wisconsin's hospital car seat program coordinator. 

Now, McIlvaine is wanting to spread that message to parents everywhere.

"That car seat was so rigid it might have even helped with preventing the whole back seat from collapsing on my daughter," McIlvaine said. "So thankful to have that car seat there. I think it made a huge difference, not only for Kent, but probably for Blythe Darby as well."