May 22nd, 2007

Oregonian Part II: A loss they never saw coming

Sunday, May 13, 2007JEFF MANNING

Meliah Warstler sat dazed in the flat gravel road, dust settling around her. It took a moment to grasp that the ATV had just rolled, tossing the 13-year-old and two other girls like rag dolls from a runaway wagon.

Meliah glanced over and saw with relief that her sister, Marrisa, 12, was up and walking. But 9-year-old cousin Tess was crying, her hand drooping at an odd angle from her arm.

Puffy clouds towered over the silent Harney County landscape, where Meliah's grandfather had a ranch and ATVs the sisters loved to ride. The machine, a 620-pound Polaris, stood on its rugged tires as if parked that way.

"Oh, my God," Meliah thought. "We just wrecked, and I'm going to be in a huge amount of trouble."

She moved to comfort Tess, then glanced back at her sister.

Marrisa had been on her feet. Now she lay in the dirt, not moving.

Three generations of Warstlers had years of experience on all-terrain vehicles, knew the dangers and believed they could handle them. They were wrong. A lighthearted lark had turned into a tragedy that would change the family forever.

"Risk in anything"

Brent Warstler speaks with a deep Western drawl, a product of his boyhood in Round Mountain, Nev. An admitted motorhead and adrenaline junkie, the 36-year-old Warstler has raced about everything with an engine, from ATVs to monster trucks. So it was only natural to get his two daughters involved at a young age.

When they were 8 and 9, he bought Meliah and Marrisa expensive, full-face helmets and taught them how to safely control ATVs, which require riders to shift their weight in turns and on hills to keep the machines from flipping.

"I wanted my children to experience life," he said. "There is a risk in anything."

Warstler knew the risk firsthand thanks to a summer night in 2003, also at his father's ranch.

He had taken out a youth-sized Honda 90 ATV to check on a broken irrigation sprinkler. As he inched along on the ATV in the dark, the Honda's front tires hit a rut carved by leaking water. Without warning, he says, the ATV flipped forward and landed on top of him.

Pain shot through his shoulder. Worse, the stout 6-footer, a former wrestler, couldn't get the 250-pound machine off him. "What a ridiculous way to die," Warstler thought as he lay pinned in the dirt. "Stuck under a kid's ATV."

He finally managed to wriggle out, but Warstler never forgot the feeling of desperation.

"I've got muscles on muscles," he said, "and this little Honda 90 kicked my butt."

It wasn't the first ATV accident for a Warstler adult. Three years earlier, Warstler's father, Jack, hopped on a Polaris 250 to help round up cattle in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

Utility ATVs like the Polaris have replaced other vehicles and horses on farms and ranches across the country. As Jack Warstler, now 60, drove through 4-foot-tall grass on the refuge, the machine nosed into a hidden washout. The Polaris pitched forward, trapping him underneath.

His injuries required two surgeries, Jack Warstler says, and he still suffers from neck and back pain.

Despite the two incidents, it was understood on the ranch that the girls were free to ride the ATVs, as long as they got permission. Jack Warstler was comfortable enough with their skills that he let them ride six miles round trip to a corral to ride horses he bought for the girls.

"I taught them good, and they were good," Jack Warstler said.

The day of the accident, the girls got permission to ride from an adult cousin. Their grandfather was napping, and they didn't want to disturb him.

"They hit that turn"

Summer meant two things for the Warstler girls: vacation and the trip to Grandpa Jack's ranch. They left behind the suburbs and their parents for a month of horseback riding, camping and rural life.

The girls were inseparable. Many assumed the sisters -- born just 13 months apart, thin as saplings with the same dark brown hair -- were twins. They wouldn't attend birthday parties unless both were invited.

Meliah was independent, Marrisa more openly affectionate. She liked nothing more than to sit patiently while her mom, Michelle, brushed her hair.

Aug. 1, 2005, dawned a beautiful day in eastern Oregon, the high desert sky shining a deep blue. The sisters were in high spirits. They'd been up since 4 a.m. helping cut lodgepole pines for fencing. They were to go camping later at Delintment Lake in the mountains of the Ochoco National Forest.

On the porch eating watermelon, they talked idly about growing up. Marrisa decided they would open a veterinary clinic together, recounted Meliah, now 15.

They'd been instructed to pack for camping. But they decided first to take out the ATV. Bombing around the dirt roads was one of the ranch's best treats, as far as they were concerned.

Meliah hopped on front. Marrisa and Tess argued about who would sit behind her in the middle. Tess lost, taking the least comfortable spot on the seat, which is intended to hold a single adult.

The girls giggled when Meliah slid the Polaris around a corner. She goosed the throttle down Penny Lane, a private gravel road, hitting between 20 and 30 mph.

Marrisa and Tess, sitting behind her, hung on.

"I was going really fast," Meliah said. "We just wanted to have fun. I fishtailed around the first corner when I knew exactly that I shouldn't be doing that. But they were like, 'Oh, do it again. . . .' "

As they zoomed into a sharp right-hand turn, the ATV crossed over a metal cattle guard in the lane with a loud thump.

The handlebars turned abruptly to the right, Meliah said, and she couldn't pull them back. The right-side wheels came up. She shifted her weight hard to the inside, just as she'd been instructed, in a last-ditch attempt to stay on all four wheels, but it wasn't enough.


Broken and helpless


Meliah hit the ground with a jolt as the ATV flipped. It took days to pick the grass and gravel from the skin in her arms.

Stunned, she looked around and saw that Tess was in tears. They were lucky, she thought, not to have been thrown into the barbed-wire fence along the road.

Marrisa, holding her side in pain, walked right past Meliah, who figured she must be headed the mile back to their grandfather's house for help.

"I don't know if it was adrenaline or something," Meliah said, "but she walked, so I figured 'OK, she's all right.' "

Then, wordlessly, Marrisa dropped.

"I actually slapped her and told her to wake up," Meliah said, her eyes welling with tears at the memory. "Her lips started to turn blue, and she started getting really pale."

Dread rose in Meliah's throat. She sent Tess running for help, but in desolate Harney County there were no neighbors close by. Meliah fought her panic and began CPR -- she had learned it earning her baby-sitting certification. She could taste her sister's blood. Marrisa didn't respond.

Meliah lifted her sister and put her on the ATV, intending to drive to the ranch. But the crash had bent the handlebars and broken off the key. She couldn't start the ATV, and even if she had, she couldn't steer it.

"I looked up at the sky and screamed for help, but no one was around," Meliah said. "The wind was blowing, so that even if someone was around me, they couldn't hear me.

"I asked, 'God, why, why did you do this to me? What have I done? What did she do? Why didn't you take me over her? She didn't do anything wrong.' "

Meliah doesn't know how long she waited, but a neighbor arrived in a pickup with Tess. Marian Greendale put the kids in the cab and called 9-1-1. She ripped fabric from her shirt and used sticks to make a splint for Tess.

Meliah looked at her own hand. It too was hanging off-kilter, with a swollen lump at the joint. Doctors later determined she had broken her wrist in the impact and worsened it trying to help her sister.

Paramedics ushered the girls into an ambulance, and Meliah took a last look at Marrisa.

She was still lying atop the ATV. Ribbons of blood trickled from her nose and mouth. Her hand hung limply, fingers brushing the dry desert grass.

Harney County sheriff's deputies said later that unlike Meliah and Tess, Marrisa had not been thrown clear when the ATV tipped. The machine rolled over on top of her, and she died of a broken neck.


A family in turmoil


Back home in Beaverton, the Warstlers struggled to cope.

Meliah went into a shell, never crying and barely speaking. Brent Warstler said he lost his job as a warehouseman at Georgia-Pacific, in part because of all the time off he took for counseling with his wife and daughter.

They went to the Dougy Center, a nonprofit in Portland that counsels grieving parents and children. There, Warstler said, they met two other families who had lost loved ones in ATV accidents.

Money got tight. They borrowed $5,700 for Marrisa's funeral using Warstler's truck as collateral.

Warstler tore apart the Polaris, a Magnum 325, determined to figure out what caused the ATV's handlebars to suddenly lurch to the right. A Polaris official told The Oregonian the company has received no reports of steering trouble with the Magnum 325 and has never issued a recall for the model.

Warstler and his wife, Michelle, felt overwhelming anger toward Jack Warstler and the two other adults on the ranch that day. Brent Warstler was aghast that his daughters weren't wearing their helmets.

Tensions worsened when Warstler threatened a wrongful-death lawsuit against his father. He contacted his dad's homeowner's insurer; Jack Warstler had paid extra to get ATV coverage and urged his son to investigate. Still, the process strained their relationship further.

Faced with the claim, the insurance company played hardball, threatening to accuse the family of negligence and call Meliah to the witness stand. The company then offered to settle for $17,000.

Brent Warstler hired his own lawyer, who advised that a "strong claim" could be made against the grandparents for letting children ride an adult-sized ATV, in violation of safety warnings that come with the machine.

Eventually, the sides settled. After paying the lawyer, the Warstlers received $98,436.

Brent Warstler considered suing Polaris, but he eventually thought better of it. Over time, he had come to an unflinching conclusion about his own responsibility for Marrisa's death.

"I was tearing apart that bike -- I wanted to know who was at fault," he said. "And I did.

"It was me. My hypocrisy, my being the idiot, of having that attitude that it couldn't happen to me."


"Be really careful"


Twenty-one months later, the Warstlers are slowly emerging from the shadow of Marrisa's death.

Brent Warstler found a good-paying construction job and is putting in long hours, allowing Michelle to be a full-time mom. Meliah is a freshman at Forest Grove High School. She likes school and is an equestrian team member.

The family moved into a new house in Cornelius. From the mantel, a portrait of Marrisa peers down.

"I think about her every day," Michelle Warstler said. "I always will."

They have never before talked publicly about their experiences. But they decided that doing so would build public awareness about the dangers of ATVs.

"I would not hand a loaded gun to my child to play with," Brent Warstler said. "Why would I send my child out to ride on an ATV? It's a piece of machinery. It has no feelings. And the bigger it is, the less forgiving it is, the less chance you have to survive a crash."

Meliah is less adamant. She still thinks it's OK for kids to ride age-appropriate machines -- but parents and children need to know the risks and take rider training.

"I'm not saying don't get an ATV," she said. "But I'd tell them, hey, learn about other accidents that have happened. Learn what they can do. Be really careful. Don't put kids on with you.

"And those stickers on the machines -- listen to them," she said. "I know if I would have, my little sister would probably be here now."

Jeff Manning: 503-294-7606; [email protected]