Hindman family shares story

By SARAH DOOLITTLE, Four Points News

Kaylene Hindman will never forget February 11, 2011.

That evening her then 14-year-old daughter, Alli, was at a party at a friend’s house in the Steiner Ranch golf course community. What Kaylene did not know was that her daughter and several friends at the party — four or five girls and a boy — decided to take the friend’s family’s golf cart for a spin around the golf course neighborhood.

Parts of the community were still under construction at the time. The group decided to take the golf cart down a long, steep hill that was paved but along which there were not yet any houses.

On the way down the hill, rolling in neutral, the cart’s driver turned too sharply and overcorrected, causing the cart to roll over.

Most of the passengers were ejected. Alli, however, was trapped under the cart and dragged approximately 30 feet beneath it down the hill.

“Five, six girls (and a boy) were in a golf cart, golf cart flips on top of her. They can’t get the golf cart off of her. It’s a newly paved road,” explained Kaylene, describing the sequence of events as she understood them.

Luckily, she continued, “Praise the Lord there was an angel, a construction worker, who came over, lifted the golf cart off of (Alli),” and bound her bleeding wounds with a t-shirt. Because she was dragged under the cart, Alli had deep abrasions, some down to the bone, on her knees, ankles and face.

One of the girls called her parents, who raced to scene and scooped up the kids to take them to the hospital. They figured it would be faster than waiting for an ambulance and were unable to see the extent of Alli’s injuries due to how dark it was outside.

Kaylene learned afterward that, all the way to the hospital, “Alli was kind of going in and out of consciousness.” She first went to Seton Healthcare Family Northwest, which sent her by ambulance to Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas, where she stayed for a total of 16 days.

“She was in shock when I finally saw her,” said Kaylene of her daughter. “She said, ‘Mom, I’m so sorry!’”

Being a teen, Alli’s concern was not just for letting her parents down, or for her injuries, which consisted of multiple, deep abrasions and a broken arm. As Kaylene explained, “(Alli) had her Canyon Ridge (Middle School) sweats on, and that’s what she was so worried about,” because students are told not to wear their sweats outside of school and Alli’s were ruined.

The aftermath
Kaylene and her husband visited the site of the crash the next day to try to reconstruct the sequence of events and were amazed by what they saw.

Besides blood, the hill was streaked with blue and pink, the colors of Alli’s sweats and sneakers, which had been ground into the pavement as Alli was dragged down the hill.

Due to the extent of the open wounds, doctors were unable to cast Alli’s broken arm, and she eventually had a total of six surgeries. “They had to do so many skin grafts,” said Kaylene. “It was just awful.”

Still Alli’s mom was impressed by her daughter throughout it all. “She handled it with grace. She barely shed any tears.”

On one occasion, however, Alli did cry. As her mom explained, “(Doctors) kept wanting to do more surgeries to improve her healing, and finally that was the one time she started crying. She said, ‘Mom, I don’t want to go under. You don’t know what it’s like to know that you’re about to go to sleep’,” and the fear of whether or not she would wake up.

The family had to return to Dell three times a week for wound care, doing it themselves at home on weekends.

“Every day was a new day. What are we up against? We had to make sure that there was no infection… She was in a wheelchair for six months,” after which Alli needed extensive physical therapy to be able to walk normally again.

Throughout the ordeal, “”The community came together,” said Kaylene. “We had people bring meals. It was just such an outpouring. It was awesome.”

“Anything can happen in the blink of an eye.”
After a long, hard year of recovery, Alli was able to run track the following year. She tried out for cheer at Vandegrift and made it as a freshman. “She worked hard to get rehabbed,” said her mom.

Now, the Hindman’s son is not allowed to ride in golf carts with other kids. (Alli is away at college.) Said Kaylene, “I don’t want to be a freak about it, but (my son) is forbidden.”

She guesses that most parents are simply unaware of the dangers, “until you’ve been impacted from it… You just have to be so careful, because anything can happen in the blink of an eye.”

Unlike a car, golf carts don’t have seat belts or airbags and are open on all four sides. Furthermore, according to Texas state law as currently written, Alli and her friends were not breaking the law when their accident occurred.

Because of state law, the Steiner Ranch Master Association and board are limited in what measures they can take to regulate or limit golf cart use, especially by minors. (The SRMA board did not respond to a request for comment.)

Statistics are not available on the number of golf cart accidents that happen in the U.S. every year, but the Consumer Product Safety Commision estimated that there were nearly 18,000 golf cart-related emergency room visits in 2015.

In the wake of the accident, “(Alli) was known as the golf cart girl in Steiner for a long time,” said Keylene of her daughter, a label Alli was eager to lose.

Now a student at the University of Oklahoma, Alli is fully recovered, though her mom says that while “It didn’t bother her before, now… she’s got a horrible scar on her knee,” as well as scarring from skin taken from her hip to cover an exposed bone on her ankle.

Golf cart safety
Having learned about golf cart safety the hard way, Kaylene had advice for others. “I would strongly recommend you be careful. Our big thing is awareness. This is what can happen. Not that it will happen but it could happen.”

She continued, “Hope and pray that it doesn’t. But if you have a young one who wants to get on that golf cart and go pick up some friends, you might just… take a look at one of (these) pictures and remember the ramifications of what it could be.”

Texas law regulating golf carts

The Texas Department of Transportation website states that registration is not needed to operate a golf cart on a public road. State law allows for use of golf carts with a slow-moving vehicle emblem in the following situations:

• In master planned communities with a uniform set of restrictive covenants in place,
• On public or private beaches,
• During the daytime and no more than two miles from where the owner usually parks the golf cart and for transportation to or from a golf course, or
• To cross intersections, including a road or street that has a posted speed limit of no more than 35 miles per hour.”