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WEST VALLEY CITY — Summer is approaching, and with it comes the reminder to wear a helmet when riding a bike or skateboard — a lesson learned by one West Valley teenager the hard way.
“I was riding my longboard. The only safety gear I was wearing was my pants,” Aaron Keener said. “I was going fast down the hill. I was pushing really fast.
“I just remember trying to put my foot down to slow down and then I just remember flying forward.”
And with that, Jeanille Keener lived every parent's nightmare as medical crews rushed her son, Aaron, to the hospital one early Sunday morning. She was informed by a police officer’s knock.
“A cop was knocking on our door and saying something about Aaron,” she said. “He was in an accident.”
Aaron’s CT scan was clean; he didn’t appear to have any swelling on the brain. He suffered a concussion, along with a number of scrapes and bruises, but in the words of his mother, “he was lucky.”
Not all crash victims walk away with relatively minor injuries, though. A Johns Hopkins survey listed head injuries as the most common hospital-related injuries sustained in bike, skates, scooter or skateboard accidents.
SAFEKIDS, an organization that specializes in child injury prevention, reports helmets could reduce the risk of head injury by as much as 85 percent. Other researchers agree that helmets would prevent 75 percent of bicycle-related fatalities among children.
Still, numerous studies suggest fewer than 40 percent of children wear helmets.
“It doesn’t improve how you look,” Aaron Keener said. “People wear necklaces, jewelry, all these different brands of clothes and shoes, but they don’t wear a helmet because it doesn’t help you improve how they look.”
Even Jeanille Keener admits helmets weren’t popular when she was young, and the sentiment has probably passed on to the next generation.
There are no “concussion-proof” helmets, but as cyclists and other riders become more aware of the need for headgear, fatalities have dropped. U.S. roads registered 726 bicycle deaths in 2011, compared to 1,003 in 1975.
“I think they should be wearing their helmets,” Jeanille Keener said. “They should be wearing their pads. It will save a lot of scrapes and stitches. But especially the helmets.
“(Aaron) was scraped up, but it could have been a lot worse.”
Contributing: Nkoyo Iyamba
