Man paralyzed in drunk driving accident tells students to make better choices than he did

Long before Kevin Kurowski's life was shattered by a drunk-driving accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down and killed another man he had learned a valuable lesson.

“It’s called ‘return on investment,’” the 30-year-old Kurowski told a group of Belmont High students gathered in the school’s music room to hear him speak yesterday. “It means that you get out of something what you put into it.”

Kurowski grew up poorer than most of his friends in Hillsboro so at a young age he began doing odd jobs to earn extra money to buy toys, clothes and gifts for his family.

At age 11, he was selling nightcrawlers for a dollar a dozen to local fishermen. At 13, he was the youngest person to graduate from the state police academy. At 17, he became the youngest manager of a Wendy’s restaurant. Not long afterwards, he left the company and became a security manager for the Ames department store chain. He left with a healthy severance package two months before Ames went bankrupt and found employment as a manager at the Weathervane seafood restaurant in Bedford. “So I’m in my twenties and making between sixty and eighty thousand dollars a year. I had a girlfriend, Kelly, and we were planning on getting married. It was great. I had tons of friends, lots of things going on in my life. I had the house, the white picket fence, the golden retriever, everything. I was living the American Dream.”

That all changed the night of Sunday, Dec. 12, 2004. Kurowski and his co-workers closed up the restaurant around 10 or 11 o’clock and, as was their bimonthly habit, went to a local bar to have a few drinks and talk about their work in a more relaxed atmosphere. Kurowski drank two beers and a shot of hard liquor.

Later, he drove one his co-workers back to the Weathervane so she could pick up her car and, sitting in his truck, he drank another can of beer.

It didn’t seem like a lot to the hard-charging young man — four beers in four hours. He didn't consider himself a heavy drinker — a couple of beer to “slow down” before he went to bed each night. He didn't drink at all during the day. He’s still not sure he's an alcoholic.

That didn’t matter later that evening. After his friend left, Kurowski started driving home. He came to a curve in the road but instead of turning, he kept going — head-on into a car driven by 56-year-old Klaus Grenz of Walpole.

“I didn’t see the turn coming. I didn’t slow down, I went straight. I hit him dead-on and I killed him,” Kurowski told the students.

The young man was in a coma for 44 days. “I was IV’d all over, I was getting all kinds of drugs because of the pain,” he said. “I didn’t know what was going on. All I knew was I’d been involved in an accident.”

After being treated at Concord Hospital, he was transferred to a rehabilitation center in Salem. “I had on a halo, one of those contraptions they stick on your head with pins going into your skull.” The device was to keep Kurowski’s head balanced while his neck healed.

“I was still in a body cast at that time. And I was coming out of my coma more and more, I’m starting to come off the narcotics and my memory is coming back, although I still couldn’t remember the accident,” he said. “So I made up my own story. I told myself I’d fallen asleep driving.”

Then one day, Kurowski coughed and his halo slipped, moving one of the pins dangerously close to his brain. He was quickly transferred to a hospital in Nashua where emergency surgery was performed.

Not long afterwards, he was scheduled to be transferred back to the rehab center. He was lying in the back of the ambulance when he heard the radio call: no beds were available for Kurowski at the center.

Readmitted to the hospital, Kurowski was still trying to understand what was going on. “I was still on these heavy narcotics,” he recalled.

He was transferred to a Manchester hospital and confessed that the was “flipping out.” “I’m thinking, how could they give my bed away (in Salem)? My wife is trying to figure out what’s going on. At this point the things I’m still going through were I’m knowing I’m never going to walk again, chronic back pain.”

That’s when Kurowski’s wife came to tell him what actually happened that fateful night. “She said, ‘Kevin you’d been drinking. You were drunk that night and you killed a man.'” For the first time, Kurowski’s voice chocked up slightly.

“It’s almost like I lifted out of my body,” he told the youngsters. “I was suicidal. There was no way I wanted to be on this earth, that I wanted to live after I knew I’d killed somebody. I wanted to kill myself, 24/7… It was the lowest point in my life, just knowing that I’d took another man’s life.”

That’s when Kurowski found out why the rehab facility was refusing to allow him to return. Since he was being charged with a felony, the insurance company was refusing to pay his medical bills. “So now I’m a million dollars in debt, I have no insurance and no hospital that wanted to take me. And it was unbelievable the things that were going on with my body.”

Kurowski wound up at a rehab center that specializes in brain injuries and was interested in starting to work with paraplegics.

It was at this low point that the old lesson the young man learned as a youngster started to come back to him. By that time, he was no longer considered to have a brain injury but his roommates did. “Some of them would wake up screaming, just flipping out. But it was awesome for me the year I spent there. Because one morning I looked up and said, How can I feel sorry for myself? I looked at my condition and thought, I still have use of my hands, I still have use of my voice, I still have use of my brain. There’s always somebody worse off than me.”

“Now I wake up everyday and say, What can I do in the future to make things better? What can I do to touch somebody else’s life, to make you think about making a better choice than I did.”

Looking back on the tragic accident, Kurowski said the one thing he learned — that he wanted to share with the students — was that he should have made his choices about drinking and driving before he got into his truck that night. “I had a lot of choices. My co-worker could have driven me home, I could have called my wife and had her drive me home, I could have called a taxi… It was a stupid choice but I didn’t make the choice to drive home, the alcohol made the choice for me.”

Kurowski said he knows that students are going to experiment with drugs and alcohol but he encouraged them to think through their choices before they do that. “I know you’re going to drink. I know you’re going to experiment, that was me… Just make a better choice than I did. Don’t do this to yourself because you’re going to end up fighting a fight you don’t want to fight, both physically and emotionally.”

As part of Kurowski’s sentence he was ordered to do 300 hours of community service on behalf of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). “I could have stuffed envelopes, I could have licked stamps…”

Instead he fell back on the ‘return on investment’ concept he practiced as a child and began speaking to groups — especially young people — about carefully considering the possible consequences of their choices.

And about how a positive attitude can turn any challenge into an opportunity. “I call this (public speaking) now a career even thought it’s not something I make money off of. There’s no way that I would ever make money off the death of Klaus Grenz."

Even though Kurowski says he sometimes stills “cries himself to sleep” thinking about the damage he’s done to another man’s family, he’s been greatly encouraged after meeting Susan Grenz, the widow of Klaus, and Klaus’s grandson, about a year ago. The family members had read in a local newspaper about how Kurowski was using his experience to encourage young people and, through their common tragedy, have formed a deep friendship.

Since then, the Kurowski says that he’s found the courage to try to make the best ‘return on investment’ of what he has now. “Everyday I wake up and I think God I’m alive. My life has been a series of choices and I can be a bad or good model. But it’s amazing. I know it does sound stupid but I’ve been doing that (thanking God for life) everyday for a year now, accepting my disability. And whatever I’ve got in three years, it’s going to be cool because I did it in a wheelchair.”

He keeps investing whatever good he can find — and somehow it keeps coming back. Throughout his speech, the students were silent as he told his story. And afterwards many came up to shake his hand and thank him, saying that he was very a inspirational person.