Boys shares story of lengthy recovery after boat explosion

One year after surviving a devastating boat explosion that left Jeremiah Hilliard and several members of his family severely burned, the 7-year-old has taken a superhero approach to turning tragedy into triumph.

On July 2, 2016, Jeremiah and his family were fishing from his grandfather’s antique boat on Swan Lake in early celebration of Independence Day.

They had been floating for hours when Hilliard’s uncle David Wagoner, the inheritor and current owner of the boat, decided it was time to head back to shore, according to Jeremiah’s mother, Alisha Hilliard. The moment he put the boat in gear, a spark ignited a fuel leak in the engine.

The engine hatch was blown off its hinges as a fireball engulfed the entire boat in an instant.

The boat’s occupants caught fire and dashed for the water, but Jeremiah, afraid to jump, hopped from one foot to the other on the burning deck.

As the rest of his family sought relief in the lake, Wagoner stayed aboard, helping Jeremiah into the water before working to extinguish the flames.

A nearby pontoon boat saw the blaze and rushed over to help get the victims to shore.

As the pontoon, loaded with Jeremiah and his wounded family, sped toward shore, Alisha sat in a hammock on the beach with her mother and 3-year-old twin boys, Uriah and Drew.

When they caught sight of the boat speeding toward them, Alisha recalled her mother saying “looks like someone’s in trouble.”

When one man ran up the beach, approaching person after person and asking for her by name, Alisha said she took off running toward the pontoon. At the shoreline, Alisha found her teenage twin sisters crying in the water, trying to cool their burns. Her brother, Wagoner, had burned all the skin off of his feet and ankles. She spotted Jeremiah sitting on a picnic table wrapped in a towel.

“He was totally calm, his face just stoic,” she said.

He told her had hurt his leg and apologized for his ruined swim shorts.

Reassuring him that she didn’t care about his shorts, Alisha unwrapped her son to reveal the true extend of his injuries. His skin hung from his leg, which was hot to the touch and swelling rapidly. His fingertips were blistered from trying to cling to the scalding deck. His arms, side, neck and ears were also burned.

One of the children, who had been on the boat, began to go into shock and was airlifted to Kalispell Regional Medical Center. Alisha sat with the rest of the family and prayed as they piled into ambulances and personal vehicles that would take them to the emergency room.

It was not until Jeremiah and his mother arrived at the hospital that they learned that 22 percent of his body was covered in second-degree burns, with third-degree burns to his left calf.

Jeremiah never lost his stoicism, Alisha said, even after he got to the hospital.

“He laid there, and he talked about how thirsty and tired he was,” Alisha said. “He didn’t talk about pain.”

In sharp contrast with his brave face was the visible evidence of how serious his injuries were.

Alisha compared the appearance of her son’s leg to that of a hot dog in the microwave. The skin was fragile and had split open. The damage done to the deeper layers on his calf was covered by the blistered top layers, trapping the heat inside and essentially burning the tissue from the inside out.

Three of the four children on board, including Jeremiah, were so badly injured they were flown to a burn center in Seattle for more extensive treatment.

There Jeremiah and his family began their rough road to recovery.

A typical, active 6-year-old at the time, Jeremiah had difficulty understanding why he was confined to bed and couldn’t move, Alisha said.

“Every time he moved was just agony,” she said.

The morning after the incident, Alisha said Jeremiah’s leg had tripled in size.

His burns required an escharotomy, a skin-grafting procedure used to treat third-degree burns. Skin was taken from both of Jeremiah’s upper thighs and reattached to cover the destroyed areas of tissue on his left calf.

“We went from a normal family vacation to fire to escharotomy,” Alisha said.

In addition to the physical damage, Alisha said he was anxious and refused to talk about the incident for weeks after it happened.

“Just the trauma itself made it difficult for him to heal at all,” she said.

The boy’s determined spirit began to surface, however, the longer he was confined to his hospital bed.

Jeremiah refused to let doctors or nurses touch him, insisting on cleaning and rewrapping his wounds himself. The process took anywhere from half an hour to three hours and had to be repeated multiple times a day. Still, he insisted on doing it himself, lashing out at hospital personnel who tried to intervene.

“Then one day he decided he was going to walk,” Alisha said. “And he did.”

The last of his cousins to put effort into walking, Jeremiah entered physical therapy, hopped on an elliptical and started peddling, bursting a few stitches in the process.

A video Alisha keeps on her phone shows Jeremiah that day, peddling hard with a focused but smiling face.

“I’ve never met a kid who can make up their mind and do something as well as he can,” Alisha said. “He’s my little trooper.”

After his initial release, Jeremiah returned to Seattle two weeks later for a check up. His doctors discovered he had developed a staph infection at the graft site on his upper thigh that landed him in the hospital for another 10 days.

“Staph infections hurt like a son of a gun, and here he is trying to be tough,” Alisha said.

In all, Jeremiah spent a total of five weeks in the hospital for an injury doctors predicted would keep him there for two and a half months.

A year older now and completely healed, Jeremiah runs, jumps and climbs on anything he can with his 4-year-old brothers.

The rest of his family have also healed and readjusted to life. Wagoner returned to work barely a month after the incident. Alisha’s twin sisters are back in school and playing basketball.

Jeremiah now calls the fading scars on his legs his “warrior wounds” and says the burns made him “super-powered.”

His mother said his attitude toward the accident has made a 180-degree turn, and he now looks for opportunities to share his experience with others.

“He doesn’t look at it as something to hold him back,” Alisha said. “He wants to help others through his story and says ‘If I can do it, you can do it.’”

At 7 years old, Jeremiah has made up his mind to join the Army when he turns 18, a decision he said he made out of a desire to use his story and his super powers to protect his country.

After that, he said, he wants to be a police officer and a logger.

“God was watching out for and taking care of my kids,” Alisha said, “but there is something to be said for the willpower of a healthy kid.”

Reporter Mary Cloud Taylor can be reached at 758-4459 or mtaylor@dailyinterlake.com.