PART 2
I want to tell you who we were, because the rest of this story does not work without it.
The Sunflower Riders MC, Topeka Chapter, is not a one-percenter club. We are not a Hells Angels charter. We are not affiliated with any of the major nationally-known motorcycle organizations that the general public usually associates with the term outlaw motorcycle club.
We are a small independent Kansas chapter of mostly working-class men and one working-class woman, founded in 1987 at a small VFW post in Topeka by a 64-year-old Vietnam veteran named Cal Renfro who has since passed away. The chapter has, in the thirty-seven years since founding, never been involved in a single criminal incident. We have been a Department of Justice and ATF-recognized non-criminal motorcycle organization for the entire history of our chapter.
We are, however — by every visible measure of our cuts, our patches, our motorcycles, and our personal appearances — exactly the kind of dangerous-looking patched motorcycle club that the general American public assumes is up to no good when thirty of us roll into a gas station together.
We have been told this, by various drivers and gas-station clerks and small-town diner managers across Kansas, approximately every weekend for the entire fifteen years I have been a patched member.
We have, by chapter charter, organizational mission, and personal commitment of every patched member, decided to use that visible appearance for one specific purpose.
We are roadside first responders.
The chapter formally instituted what we call the Hold Steady Protocol on Saturday, August 14, 2010. The protocol was named after the HOLD STEADY knuckle tattoo that Padre Hollister had gotten in 1991 from a fellow Army combat medic at Fort Riley, Kansas. The protocol is, in its complete written form, sixteen pages long. It covers chapter ride protocols for encountering motor vehicle accidents, single-vehicle incidents, motorcycle-down incidents involving non-chapter riders, medical emergencies at gas stations and rest areas, and structural emergencies such as a vehicle fire or a downed pedestrian.
The protocol’s first sentence — printed in bold across the top of page one — reads: Sunflower Riders MC patched members will not ride past any human being who is in observable medical distress on a Kansas roadway. Ever. Under any circumstance. This is the cost of the cut.
Padre had drafted that sentence himself in 2010.
I had signed my chapter membership oath under that sentence in 2010 at the small chapter clubhouse on East 15th Street in Topeka, where I have signed it again every two years at every chapter re-charter since.
I want to seed something here that matters.
By the time we crested the ridge at mile marker 339 on I-70 westbound on that Sunday afternoon in late September of this year, the Sunflower Riders MC, Topeka Chapter, had executed the Hold Steady Protocol on Kansas roadways approximately seventy-four times over the fifteen years since the protocol was first instituted in August of 2010.
We had stopped at twenty-three single-vehicle accidents on Kansas highways.
We had stopped at fourteen multi-vehicle accidents.
We had stopped at eleven motorcycle-down incidents involving non-chapter riders.
We had stopped at nine roadside medical emergencies — heart attacks, strokes, seizures, and one woman in active labor at a Phillips 66 gas station near Manhattan, Kansas in 2017.
We had stopped at twelve livestock-on-roadway incidents, four downed-tree-blocking-traffic incidents on rural state highways, and one barn fire on a county road outside Holton.
We had performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation, on the side of Kansas highways and at Kansas gas stations, on twenty-three separate human beings.
Eleven of those twenty-three CPR recipients had survived to hospital discharge.
We had delivered one baby — Padre’s hands, in a Phillips 66 bathroom in Manhattan, with the mother’s husband holding her hand and three other patched brothers blocking the door and giving her privacy.
We had pulled twelve unconscious drivers from burning vehicles before fire-rescue arrived on scene.
We had not, in fifteen years and seventy-four executed protocols, lost a single first-responder action that we had personally initiated to misconduct, civil liability, or criminal investigation. The Kansas Highway Patrol and the Kansas Department of Transportation, by formal regional memorandum dated April 2019, had recognized the chapter as one of seven civilian roadside-response partner organizations in the state of Kansas.
We had a small framed certificate of recognition on the wall of our small clubhouse on East 15th Street.
We had been doing this for fifteen years.
We had been doing it because Padre Hollister, in 1991, in a sand-blown medic tent outside Kuwait City during Operation Desert Storm, had been the only Army combat medic on duty when a Bradley fighting vehicle from his own company had rolled over an unexploded mine, and four of his closest brothers had bled out on the desert floor in front of him because he had not been able to get to them fast enough.
He had not let any other human being bleed out in front of him since.
He had not let his chapter ride past any other human being who might.
That was the entire reason for the Hold Steady Protocol.
That was the entire reason we did what we did on I-70 at 3:47 p.m. on that Sunday afternoon in late September.
PART 3
I want to walk you through the eleven minutes between the moment Padre’s fist went up on the ridge at 3:47 p.m. and the moment Kansas Highway Patrol Sergeant Daniel Mercer stepped out of his cruiser at mile marker 339.6 at 3:58 p.m.
Because the eleven minutes are the entire story.
By 3:47:30 p.m., thirty Harleys had come to controlled stops on the I-70 shoulder.
By 3:48:15 p.m., Padre had executed the three-signal protocol and the formation had broken into its standard four-element response.
Element one — lane block — was led by chapter road captain Diesel and consisted of eight patched brothers. They moved twelve Harleys forward into both directions of the I-70 lanes to create a controlled hard block approximately fifty yards behind the easternmost involved vehicle and fifty yards ahead of the westernmost involved vehicle. They set out reflective emergency triangles from their saddlebags every fifteen yards in both directions. They directed civilian traffic to slow and stop. They created an emergency-vehicle corridor in the inside left shoulder of the eastbound lanes so that arriving emergency vehicles could enter the scene without delay.
Element two — dispatch communications — was led by a 49-year-old patched brother named Stoney who had been a 911 dispatcher for the Topeka Police Department from 2002 to 2016 before retiring to take care of his elderly mother. Stoney was on his personal cell phone to Kansas Highway Patrol dispatch by 3:48:45 p.m. providing exact GPS coordinates, the visible vehicle count of fourteen involved vehicles, the visible casualty count of an estimated seven to nine human beings requiring medical attention, the wind direction and approximate fuel-leak status from two visibly leaking vehicles, and a request for a minimum of four ambulances, two heavy-rescue vehicles, two state trooper units, and one fire-suppression unit.
Element three — primary triage — was led by Padre himself and consisted of six patched brothers including me, Walter the retired ER doctor, Diesel’s medic-trained partner Hank, and two other certified first-responder brothers. We moved forward toward the wreckage with our trauma kits from our saddlebags. Every patched member of the chapter, by Hold Steady Protocol, carries a personal trauma kit in their saddlebag at all times during chapter rides. Each kit contains a CAT tourniquet, an Israeli pressure bandage, a chest seal, four packs of QuikClot, a cervical collar, a pocket mask for CPR, nitrile gloves, trauma shears, and a small notebook for casualty notes.
Element four — secondary support — was led by the remaining patched brothers and consisted of crowd control, witness statement gathering, blanket distribution to ambulatory victims, child supervision for an estimated three children who were ambulatory at the scene, and immediate de-escalation for the inevitable two or three civilian bystanders who would attempt to start filming with their phones.
By 3:50:14 p.m. — three minutes after Padre’s fist had gone up — every element was fully operational.
The thirty patched bikers of the Sunflower Riders MC had transformed a chaotic 14-vehicle pileup with multiple casualties into a controlled emergency-response scene with established perimeter, established triage, established communications, and established support.
Element three — my element, the primary triage team — moved through the wreckage in the disciplined two-person-pair pattern we had drilled for fifteen years.
Padre and Walter took the overturned silver minivan in the right westbound lane.
Diesel and Hank took the crushed sedan that had been rear-ended by a semi-truck.
I took the small red Honda Civic that had spun completely around and was now facing the wrong direction in the median, with my partner — a 38-year-old patched brother named Wade who is a volunteer firefighter in Shawnee County.
Inside the small red Honda Civic in the median I found a 31-year-old white American woman in the driver’s seat named Marisol Reeves — who I would learn her name from her purse twenty seconds later — unconscious, with a visible deep laceration on her left forehead, weak but present radial pulse, agonal breathing pattern, and a small four-year-old white American boy in a car seat in the back seat named Jacob who was conscious, in mild shock, and crying quietly.
I went into the front seat through the passenger door.
Wade went into the back seat to get Jacob.
I will not write out the next forty-five seconds in clinical detail. I will say only that Marisol Reeves’s airway was compromised, that I cleared it with manual cervical-spine-precaution positioning, that her breathing pattern stabilized within thirty seconds of clear airway, that she had a depressed skull fracture on her left forehead that was not actively bleeding but was clearly serious, and that I held her cervical spine in alignment with both my hands for the entire eight minutes that followed until the first ambulance arrived.
Wade carried four-year-old Jacob carefully out of the car seat, wrapped him in a soft fleece blanket from his saddlebag, sat down on the asphalt of the median fifteen feet from the wreckage with the four-year-old held gently in his lap, and quietly spoke to him in a low calm voice for the next eight minutes until the paramedics arrived.
Wade had a four-year-old daughter of his own at home.
He talked to Jacob about his daughter.
Jacob stopped crying within ninety seconds.
He fell asleep against Wade’s chest at approximately 3:55 p.m.
In the other vehicles, similar primary triage actions were happening simultaneously.
Padre and Walter pulled three conscious adult victims and one unconscious adult driver from the overturned minivan. Walter immediately diagnosed the unconscious driver — a 56-year-old man — as having an acute tension pneumothorax. He performed a needle decompression in the field with a 14-gauge angiocath from his trauma kit. The man’s breathing stabilized within ninety seconds.
Diesel and Hank stabilized two passengers in the rear-ended sedan, both of whom had what Hank assessed as likely cervical-spine injuries, and held both victims in cervical-spine precautions for the entire eight minutes until EMS arrived with proper backboards.
Three other patched brothers handled four ambulatory victims with minor injuries and one elderly woman with chest pain — likely cardiac — to whom Walter administered aspirin from his trauma kit at 3:54 p.m.
Two other patched brothers had identified, by 3:52 p.m., a clearly fatal incident in a crushed pickup truck near the front of the pileup. They had verified that the driver had no detectable pulse, no detectable breathing, and visible incompatible-with-life injuries. They had then carefully covered the driver with a clean tarp from their saddlebag, marked the vehicle, and moved on to live victims who could still be helped.
Padre had drilled us, in 2010 and every two years since: Brothers. We triage. We do not waste resources on what is already gone. The living come first. Mourn the dead later.
By 3:55 p.m. — eight minutes after Padre’s fist had gone up — every single live victim at the scene had been assessed, stabilized to the maximum extent of our training, and placed under continuous direct care of a patched member who was holding airway, holding pressure on bleeding, holding cervical spines, or holding small children.
Every single ambulatory victim had been given a blanket, water from a chapter brother’s saddlebag canteen, and a calm patched brother to sit with them and tell them help was on the way.
The flow of traffic in both directions had been completely controlled.
A clear emergency-vehicle corridor was open and waiting.
Kansas Highway Patrol dispatch had been given continuous updates by Stoney from element two for eight straight minutes.
PART 4
Kansas Highway Patrol Sergeant Daniel Mercer arrived first.
He was driving Unit 7-Adam-12 — a Kansas Highway Patrol Dodge Charger cruiser in the standard white-and-blue Kansas state trooper livery — westbound on I-70 from his patrol post near Wamego, Kansas, twenty-two miles to the east.
He arrived at mile marker 339.6 at 3:58 p.m. — exactly eleven minutes after Padre’s fist had gone up on the ridge.
He had been informed by dispatch, en route, that a 14-vehicle multi-vehicle accident had been reported at his current location by a civilian caller from a small motorcycle organization at 3:48 p.m., that the caller was an off-duty former Topeka PD dispatcher with established credentials, and that dispatch had been receiving continuous professional-grade updates from that same caller for the previous ten minutes.
He had been told by dispatch, at approximately 3:54 p.m., that the scene appeared to be already secured by the calling organization.
He had not, by his own honest account to the Topeka Capital-Journal in an interview the following week, been entirely sure what secured by the calling organization was actually going to look like when he arrived.
Sergeant Daniel Mercer was 47 years old. White American. Six feet tall. Solid stocky build. Nineteen years on the Kansas Highway Patrol. Two combat tours in the Iowa Army National Guard during the early years of Operation Iraqi Freedom. A father of three. A graduate of the FBI National Academy. The senior patrol sergeant for the Wabaunsee County corridor of I-70 for the previous six years.
He had been the first state trooper on scene at approximately one hundred and forty-seven multi-vehicle pileups in his career.
He had never, in those nineteen years, arrived at a scene where the work was already done.
He stepped out of his cruiser at 3:58:14 p.m.
He stood beside his cruiser for one full second with his hand resting on the open door, looking at what was in front of him.
He saw a flawlessly controlled traffic perimeter in both directions of I-70. He saw reflective emergency triangles set up at proper intervals. He saw an open emergency-vehicle corridor on the inside left shoulder of the eastbound lanes. He saw twelve patched bikers in worn black leather cuts working perimeter control in absolute disciplined silence with civilian drivers cooperating. He saw a chapter brother on a personal cell phone giving continuous updates to dispatch. He saw, in the median fifteen feet from a small red Honda Civic, a patched brother holding a sleeping four-year-old boy in his lap on the asphalt. He saw, inside the same small red Honda, a 46-year-old female patched member of the chapter — me — holding cervical spine precautions on an unconscious 31-year-old female driver with a careful trauma-kit cervical collar already in place.
He saw Padre Hollister and a 67-year-old patched brother with grey hair working over an unconscious 56-year-old male driver on the asphalt beside the overturned silver minivan — with a 14-gauge angiocath already placed and a chest seal already applied.
He saw Diesel and Hank holding spinal precautions on two conscious victims in a crushed sedan, both victims with cervical collars already in place and both visibly stable.
He saw four ambulatory victims wrapped in clean blankets sitting carefully on the median grass with patched brothers sitting beside them speaking quiet calming words.
He saw, at the front of the pileup, a crushed pickup truck respectfully covered with a clean tarp.
He saw, in total, approximately seven live victims under continuous direct care of a patched member of the Sunflower Riders MC who knew exactly what they were doing.
He stood beside his cruiser for one more second.
He keyed his radio.
He said, in his calm professional voice: “Dispatch, Unit 7-Adam-12. I’m on scene at mile marker 339.6. Scene is secured. Repeat — scene is secured. Sunflower Riders are on it. I count seven live victims under active triage care, one confirmed fatality covered and marked, complete perimeter established. Tell incoming EMS this is a hot direct hand-off. We are not establishing a scene. The Sunflower Riders have already established the scene. We are taking over the scene from civilian responders.”
He paused.
He said: “Dispatch. This is the most professional triage scene I have walked into in nineteen years. I want that on the record.”
PART 5
The seeds were everywhere.
Padre Hollister, in 1991, in that sand-blown Army medic tent outside Kuwait City during Operation Desert Storm, had not been able to get to four of his closest brothers fast enough.
He had made one private quiet personal promise to himself in 1991 — that he would never again ride past a single human being in observable medical distress for the rest of his life.
He had kept that promise for thirty-three years.
He had built an entire motorcycle chapter around that promise.
The Hold Steady Protocol — the sixteen-page chapter document Padre had drafted in 2010 — had been written in his small one-bedroom apartment in Topeka over the course of approximately fourteen months. He had researched every roadside-response best practice in the American emergency medical services literature. He had personally consulted with three Topeka-area trauma physicians, four Kansas Highway Patrol troopers, two Shawnee County paramedics, and the regional director of the American Red Cross.
He had presented the protocol to the chapter at the August 2010 chapter meeting. The vote had been unanimous.
The protocol had been formally adopted at 9:47 p.m. on Saturday, August 14, 2010.
Padre had spoken one short sentence after the vote.
He had said: “Brothers. We will be different from now on. We will be the first to stop. That is our patch.”
He had not said anything else.
He had not needed to.
The seventy-four executed protocols in the fifteen years since 2010 had not made any news. The chapter had no public Facebook page. The chapter did not post about their roadside-response actions. The chapter did not give interviews. The chapter did not, by Padre’s absolute personal insistence, accept any form of public recognition for the work.
The chapter did this — by Padre’s quiet absolute personal account to me at our small clubhouse in October of last year — because brothers and sister, we do not ride to be famous. We ride to be the ones who stop. That is the entire reason for the cut.
The 14-vehicle pileup on I-70 at mile marker 339 on that Sunday afternoon in late September would have stayed quiet, like the other seventy-three protocols had, except for one specific fact.
Sergeant Daniel Mercer’s radio transmission at 3:59 p.m. that Sunday afternoon — Dispatch. This is the most professional triage scene I have walked into in nineteen years. I want that on the record — had been recorded on the Kansas Highway Patrol dispatch audio archive.
The audio archive of that exact transmission, by standard state-trooper protocol, had been pulled by the Kansas Highway Patrol public information office on Tuesday morning of the following week as part of the standard post-incident review.
The Kansas Highway Patrol Public Information Officer, a 39-year-old white American woman named Captain Helen Brody, had listened to the audio recording on Tuesday afternoon.
She had then called Sergeant Mercer at his post in Wamego to verify what he had said.
Sergeant Mercer had confirmed every word.
Captain Helen Brody had, by Wednesday morning of the following week, posted a single carefully-worded statement to the official Kansas Highway Patrol Facebook page that read in part:
“On Sunday afternoon at 3:47 p.m., a 14-vehicle multi-vehicle pileup occurred on I-70 westbound at mile marker 339. The first thirty civilians on scene were the patched members of the Sunflower Riders MC, Topeka Chapter, who had been riding past on a chapter ride. They stopped. They established perimeter. They performed primary triage on every involved vehicle. They administered field-medical interventions including needle thoracostomy, cervical spine immobilization, and pediatric trauma care. They controlled traffic in both directions of I-70 for the entire eleven minutes before the first Kansas Highway Patrol unit arrived. By the time Sergeant Daniel Mercer of the Kansas Highway Patrol arrived at 3:58 p.m., every live victim at the scene had been stabilized. Of the seven live victims under their care, six were discharged from area hospitals within seventy-two hours. The seventh — a 56-year-old male driver whose acute tension pneumothorax was decompressed in the field by a retired emergency medicine physician who is a patched member of the chapter — is currently in stable condition at Stormont Vail. The Kansas Highway Patrol thanks the Sunflower Riders MC, Topeka Chapter, for their continued partnership with our agency. — Captain Helen Brody, KHP Public Information Office.”
The post went up on Wednesday, October 1st, at 11:14 a.m.
By Friday afternoon, it had crossed 1.4 million shares.
By the following Monday, it had been picked up by USA Today, CNN, the Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal.
The chapter, by Padre’s absolute insistence, did not give any interviews.
The chapter spoke through Captain Brody and Sergeant Mercer only.
PART 6
That was three months ago.
The seven live victims have all recovered.
The 56-year-old man whose pneumothorax Walter decompressed in the field — his name was Tom Devereaux, of Salina, Kansas, age 56, married, three adult children — was discharged from Stormont Vail Hospital on Wednesday, October 1st of that same week. The discharging trauma physician at Stormont Vail — a 51-year-old physician named Dr. Aisha Patel who has been on the Stormont Vail trauma service for fourteen years — told Tom and his wife in the discharge conference, on the official medical record: “Mr. Devereaux. The needle decompression that retired Dr. Walter Hodges performed on you in the field on Sunday afternoon saved your life. Nothing my team did at this hospital would have mattered if Walter had not done that in the field at 3:53 p.m. Please thank him for me.”
Tom Devereaux drove with his wife to the Sunflower Riders MC clubhouse on East 15th Street in Topeka on Saturday morning, October 4th. He shook Walter Hodges’s enormous tattooed hand on the front porch. He did not say much. He did not need to.
Marisol Reeves — the 31-year-old driver of the small red Honda whose cervical spine I held for eight minutes — and her four-year-old son Jacob were both discharged from Stormont Vail on Tuesday afternoon, September 30th. Marisol had a hairline skull fracture and a moderate concussion. Jacob was completely uninjured.
Marisol called me at the hospital two days after her discharge. She had gotten my name from the post-incident report. She had said, in a voice that did not work properly: “Maria. Thank you for not letting me die on the side of the road. Jacob needs me to keep being his mom. Thank you.”
I had not been able to speak for a moment.
I had said: “Marisol. That is the patch. That is what it means.”
She had not understood the answer.
She had been a 31-year-old single mother who had been driving home from her shift at a Topeka Hy-Vee at the time of the accident.
She had not known anything about the Hold Steady Protocol.
She had only known that thirty dangerous-looking patched bikers had been the people who had decided not to drive past her car.
Padre Hollister, by my official chapter-treasurer report at the November 12th chapter meeting, has received seventy-three personal handwritten thank-you cards from family members of victims at the September 28th incident.
He has not opened any of them yet.
He has, by his own quiet account to me, set them in a small wooden box on his bedroom dresser at his small house in north Topeka.
He has said he will open them, slowly, one at a time, over the next year or two — because brothers and sister, you do not eat seventy-three thank-yous in one sitting. You eat them one at a time, the way you eat any good food.
The Sunflower Riders MC, Topeka Chapter, has, since October of this year, received seventeen formal inquiries from other patched motorcycle clubs across Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Oklahoma asking about the Hold Steady Protocol.
Padre has personally sent each requesting chapter a complete printed copy of the sixteen-page protocol.
He has not charged for them.
He has not asked for credit.
He has written one short personal letter to each requesting chapter president, in his careful old-school handwriting, that reads in part: Brother. This is the protocol. It works because we work it. If your chapter wants to be the first to stop, you have my permission to copy every page. The patch is what you do for strangers on the highway when nobody is looking. — Padre.
Three of the seventeen requesting chapters have now formally adopted the protocol.
We expect more in the spring.
PART 7
I rode past mile marker 339 on I-70 westbound last Sunday afternoon at 3:47 p.m.
I was alone.
I had stopped on the shoulder.
I had killed my engine.
The shoulder was empty. The Kansas autumn light was warm. The Flint Hills stretched away to the south in long rolling waves of dry tall grass. A few late-autumn cars passed me on I-70 at 75 miles per hour and did not slow down. They did not have any reason to. There was no wreckage. There were no victims. There was no fire-rescue. There was no Kansas Highway Patrol.
There was, however, a small new official Kansas Highway Patrol roadside memorial marker — a small clean metal plaque mounted on a small steel post that the Kansas Department of Transportation had installed two weeks earlier as part of the formal post-incident review process.
The plaque read, in clean small lettering: In recognition of the civilian first responders of the Sunflower Riders Motorcycle Club, Topeka Chapter, who on September 28th of this year stopped at this location and saved seven lives. — Kansas Highway Patrol.
That was all.
The plaque did not mention any names.
It did not mention the protocol.
It did not mention Padre.
It did not need to.
Some patches, you don’t wear to be seen.
Some, you wear to be the first one to stop.
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