Tonight He Lived

I woke up to a phone call yesterday morning at 3:15 am. I knew that the call was about something serious. I’ve had calls that early in the morning about serious stuff quite a few times in my life. I tried to wake up and answer as quickly as possible. I wanted to get past the “hello” to hear what was on the other side of it, so my “hello” was quick and attentive. “Mr. Shumway?” the serious sounding man on the line said. “Yes?” I said. “I’m officer Norris with the Wasatch County Sheriff’s department. I’m here with your son, Tyler,” he said.

From what I knew about Tyler, I was fairly certain about what the deputy sherrif would say next. Tyler is 16 years old. He has special needs. Well, that’s what some would say, and I too, would say that he has uncommon needs, but that is not how I define him. To me, he is amazing.

The 7 Eleven is 3.4 Miles away from our house. I looked over at the digital temperature gauge that sits next to my bedroom window that looked out over the cloudy and cold scene of winter. “30 degrees” it read. I knew that the only method that Tyler had to make it to 7 Eleven was his own two feet. His bike tire was flat. He asked me a few days ago to buy a tube for him. He doesn’t drive. “He must have been planning this for days,” I thought with amazement and curiosity.

“Ok. Is he ok?” I asked. “Yes. He’s just fine. He just walked from your house to 7 Eleven. He bought a few snacks and then walked up to me and a few other deputies at the store and asked for one of us to drive him home because he didn’t want to walk back home in the cold. He’s not wearing a coat,” he said. “Ok. I had no idea….” I started to say before deputy Norris interjected. “He told us that he snuck out and that you had no idea. So, I’m going to just bring him home to you if that’s ok,” Officer Norris said.

I put on some shorts, my van’s shoes without socks, my cotton hoodie, and my medium weighted Columbia jacket and walked to the front porch and waited for the sheriff deputy to arrive. When they arrived at around 3:30 am, the deputy got out first and said, “hello.” “Hello,” I said back. “I have to open Tyler’s door for him,” Norris said. He walked to Tyler’s door, opened it, and Tyler got out. Tyler looked up at me. “Oh, heyyyyy!” he said with the tone and inflection that would be normal for informal or social situations, not “I’m just now getting out of a law enforcement vehicle.” I could tell from the look on Tyler’s face when I didn’t reply, “Oh, heyyyyy!” back to him, that it was the first time since this night started for him that he realized that there was a problem with the situation.

“Hey buddy,” I said as Tyler walked up the stairs from the driveway and passed me to go inside. The look on his face said, “Did I do something wrong here?”

“Go ahead and go inside. I’m going to talk to the deputy.”

When Tyler shut the door behind him, I turned to Deputy Norris. “Thank you for bringing Tyler home. He has done this before,” I said. “Yeah. That’s what he told us,” he said. “He told us that he made this trek on his bike at 2 am last summer,” he lightly chuckled, “But it’s 30 degrees, and he’s not wearing a jacket. And he walked this time.” I just shook my head in awe, just as the deputy did. “How long do you think it took him,” I said. “At least an hour. Probably closer to an hour and a half” the deputy said. “Yeah, at least.” I said, shaking my head in confusion. “I told him about curfew and how it wasn’t safe for him to be out this late,” he said. “Thank you,” I said. “You’re welcome,” he said. Deputy Norris then turned and walked to his truck, got in, and drove away.

I went inside and Krystal, my wife and Tyler’s mom, was upset, and that was ok with me. Tyler, who is 6′ 7″ tall, stood a few feet in front of Krystal. “You can’t just leave the house in the middle of the night. You need to talk to us. You know this,” She said. “I know. I’m sorry,” Tyler said. Krystal looked at me and shook her head with furrowed brows as if to say, “Why?” I gave her a look of “I wish I knew.”

“We’re glad you’re safe. We love you. Don’t do that again,” I said. “I won’t,” he said. “Good night,” I said. Tyler walked into his room and shut the door behind him.

Krystal and I went back to bed and laid awake staring at the ceiling in silence. Krystal spoke first, “I am sooooo angry at him right now,” she said. “I know. That’s a pretty normal way to feel about getting a call from the police at 3:15 am,” I said. “He’s getting some F’s in his classes. He is up all night because he has sleep problems. By the time school comes, he has been awake for 24 hours. He comes home from school and goes to bed at 3 pm and then sleeps until school the following morning.” she ranted. “I know. It’s such a crazy schedule,” I said to validate her.

The call early on Tuesday morning and calls like it are nothing new to me and Krystal. Tyler has been picked up by or rescued by the police, the staff at water parks, national parks employees, random strangers, and us, for his entire life. He is a chronic escaper. He is a genius at the art of escape and running away.

When he was 3 he began leaving the house without us knowing. We installed dual-sided locks. My wife, Krystal, and I would keep keys to the doors of the house with us at all times, but Tyler had an “abandoned key” radar and knew when the keys were set down somewhere. He would wait until we were away from him and unlock the front door and escape. We added a latch to the front door at the very top. He couldn’t reach it, even with a dining table chair. So, the next day he slid the dining room table to the front door and escaped. The final answer was a GPS tracker that was secured between his shoulder blades in a harness that was locked with a combination lock at the front on his chest. He couldn’t remove it to not be tracked, like he had done with his GPS watch and phone that we had put in a fanny pack that he learned to remove to gain his freedom. The GPS tracker on his back had software that allowed me to create a mapped perimeter around our home. When Tyler breached the perimeter, an email would come through to my phone notifying me of the breach. We finally had a solution. And it saved us, and Tyler, many times.

We had no reason to believe that Tyler had any developmental delays when he was born. When he didn’t walk on time and when he didn’t have a vocabulary, we took him to the pediatrician. “Some kids are just delayed,” he told us. We had Tyler go through some testing to see where Tyler stood in relation to normal cognition. They told us that he had nearly no cognition. He was in the lowest 1% for brain cognition. Krystal and I were devastated.

Then we learned during a routine ear exam that Tyler couldn’t hear. His ears were completely blocked with pressurized fluid, preventing his ear drums from vibrating.

He had surgery to correct this and his hearing improved, but tests a few months after his hearing was corrected confirmed that there was only a slight improvement to his cognitive tests scores since his hearing issues were addressed.

I was a solution consultant in the tech industry. I was skilled at looking at problems and finding solutions. I saw that part of Tyler’s brain light up the same way as mine did when I tried to solution a problem when he looked for ways to escape our home. I knew that there was more going on in his brain than these “tests” could measure. It was an adventure to him. I could see that if something stood in the way of something he wanted, he would figure out a way to overcome it. There were no test scores for that. Tyler would prove to us that he could overcome anything.

As he grew older, Krystal and I didn’t know how to handle him. We used tablets and video games to entertain him. He didn’t know how to talk very well. He didn’t know how to communicate what he needed, and we didn’t know how to respond to the incessant screaming and increasing violent behavior that were a constant in our home due to Tyler’s outbursts when something happened on his tablet or in his video games that he didn’t like.

The entire family retreated to their rooms. Tyler had the whole house to himself. He was making huge messes. We tried to use software and parental controls to give him boundaries, but he learned online how to hack them. I used to go into the family computer and unplug the components to keep the computer from working, but he learned how to reconnect them.

It wasn’t working for any of us anymore. His three older brothers were living out their childhoods in their rooms. They made the first move to help us correct this out of control situation. “Can you please do something about these issues with Tyler? It’s making our lives suck,” they told us.

We decided to make healing Tyler the highest priority. Krystal had just earned her college degree and gotten her first job in accounting, but she knew that Tyler needed her home. I needed her home, too, because I was not able to keep up with all of Tyler’s needs on my own during the day. My job was being neglected to help manage Tyler. Krystal quit her job to help everyone.

She headed up the project of having Tyler diagnosed. Soon, with Tyler’s diagnosis of Autism, she and I were able to get him the care that was specific to his needs. Our marriage and family therapist referred us to “Star of California,” for in-home therapy.

In September of 2019, Krystal, Tyler, and I began ABA Therapy. Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy is an evidence-based, structured, and personalized approach, often called the “gold standard” for treating autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It uses techniques like positive reinforcement to increase helpful behaviors, teach new skills, and improve social, communication, and daily living skills, often tailored to children’s needs. ABA therapy and our in-home therapists were there to enable us to be the parents that Tyler needed us to be for him to have a happy life. Krystal and I soon realized that the therapy that they were giving was mostly for us. Little by little we learned how to communicate and respond to things that would previously cause chaos in our home.

By the time the pandemic hit, our family of 6 had been in therapy for six months. We were ready for what life had in store for us. We were ready to learn how to do things in a healthy way. We were ready to bring peace back to our family by helping Tyler.

During this time, I had been learning in couples therapy about how to listen and validate someone who is triggered, like Tyler was often. As I listened to Tyler scream at a video game one day (we were working with our therapists to reduce his video game time) I decided to dive into Tyler’s world and understand what was behind his screaming. I used my newly found listening skills in my conversation with Tyler. By the end of the conversation, I realized, “Tyler has some pretty valid reasons for screaming, and he was calm after I validated him.” It was a breakthrough. He was just like me. Sometimes I felt like screaming, too. The more that Krystal and I, and our three older sons, understood and validated Tyler, the more calm he became and in turn, our home was more peaceful. We slowly started coming out of our rooms. We began rebuilding our bonds as a family.

At the end of 2021, in only a year and half of therapy, we were in a (mostly) calm and peaceful home. In 2026, Tyler still has his moments, but he has grown into a beautiful, functional 16 year old boy. He no longer wears a GPS tracker. We have learned to talk about these moments and learn from them. Tyler is our partner in this.

A year ago, Krystal and I met with the school administrators and Tyler’s case manager at Timpview high school halfway into his freshman year to get an update about how they felt Tyler was doing in school. After some back and forth about where Tyler should be placed, Mr. Dorathy, one of the school administrators, spoke up. “I don’t know what other testing has been done on Tyler’s cognitive skills, but we gave him an IQ test and he scores as pretty close to normal on his cognition scores.” Mr. Dorathy projected his laptop screen onto the large TV at the front of the conference room table.

I turned to Krystal. “I knew it,” I said with tears in my eyes. I knew that he was smarter than “nearly no cognition.” But that was only confirmation of what I had known Tyler’s entire life: he is amazing.

We had made Tyler’s emotional health our number one priority. He may not do well in some classes at school, but we have learned to talk about and manage our big emotions as a family so that they don’t become harmful to each other. It took us a long time to learn how to communicate “the healthy way” and to regulate our emotions, but it has been worth it because it has taken our home from a place of chaos and isolation, to a place of equilibrium and peace. Doing things “the healthy way” has taken our relationships with each other from distant to connected and we are “there” for each other in ways that we couldn’t have imagined before we started therapy.

After Krystal had a chance to give words to her emotions and be validated after the incident early on Thursday morning, I told her my thoughts on the situation. “You and I both snuck out when we were his age, right?” I said, “Yeah, that’s true,” Krystal said. “I can’t tell you how many times I stayed out late when my parents believed I was in bed,” I said. “Tyler has been waiting all winter to be able to sell water in town so that he could have money to buy the things he wants. A coke. A bag of Doritos, and some gummy bears. He made $50 today. There’s no school tomorrow. He was just itching to be free. He probably knew that we would tell him “no” and the risk was worth it to him,” I said. “I don’t blame him. He’s been cooped up all winter in his room. Tonight he lived,” I said. Krystal looked at me and we laughed. “Why does he have to be soooo harrrrd?” she said as she laughed.

We had a safe and educational conversation with Tyler later in the day yesterday about what went wrong yesterday morning and what we’ll do next time. Now he knows. Tyler is working toward being able to live on his own one day. To me, Krystal, and Tyler, these moments are moments to learn and grow. Tyler is escaping less and communicating with us more. “Progress not perfection” is our mantra. By having safe conversations and educating Tyler about how to satisfy his need for freedom in safe ways, he is growing and becoming safe for himself. There is no shame or blame. In its place there is communication with each other about how our patterns impact our lives and each other and then responding with care. This is love.