By Stowell P. Watters
Staff Writer
    “Hello, Sue? I don’t know how to tell you this, but there’s been an accident. Chris got hit by a train.”
    This is the opening sentence of the story written by Sue Paul of Arundel that details her husband Chris’ accident with a train and the couple’s unfolding hardships.
    The two met in Florida and moved to Valdosta, Ga. a year later in 2005. There, Sue made plans to take business classes at The Georgia Military College. Chris had just left a factory job and was seeking employment through Labor Finders, a temporary work agency in Valdosta. On July 27, 2007 the agency put him to work with Fogelman Builder Supply. That day, said Chris, will haunt him forever.
    “We were in a Ford F550 – a huge diesel – I was riding in the passenger seat when the driver stopped to look at directions, we were in the neighborhood, we just needed a house number,” Chris said. As the driver looked at a map at an intersection he slowly released the brake on the vehicle, causing it to roll – indetectably – forward onto the tracks.
    What Chris saw next is the only image he can resurrect from the wreck; a train barreling down on him, the Norfolk southbound train traveling at an estimated 50 miles per hour.
    The truck was crushed and thrown 20 yards into a ditch. The driver faired much better than Chris, who was taken to the Georgia Medical Center where he was treated for a contusion to the head that required 16 stitches. Chris’ ear needed to be reattached, he fractured his C3 neck vertebrae along with both of his hips and most of the ribs on the right side of his body. A doctor told him he was lucky to be alive.
    “Boy I didn’t feel lucky,” Chris said. “I was in agony, all I could move was my mouth.”
    Chris was totally incapacitated for two months as his body healed from the crash. But the damage done to the couple was just beginning.
    “Without Chris’ income we had no money, we had no food, we couldn’t pay our bills, it was a mess,” Sue said.     
    Seventeen days after the accident, and after lengthy arguments with the insurance company, the couple received their first workman’s compensation check.
    The amount: $45.
    “Forty five dollars? How were we supposed to live on $45 a week? It was mind blowing, on top of that I had my husband’s health to worry about,” Sue said.
    But still the problems continued for the couple. Their apartment lease expired on Aug. 1, just five days after Chris’ accident. The couple had begun moving into a new place, also in Valdosta, but had only moved a few sets of clothes, a box spring and mattress and their washer and dryer.
    Sue got a call from her landlord while she was at the hospital with Chris.
    “On July 28 he informed me that he had taken all of our stuff out of the apartment, and ‘relocated’ it.” Sue said.
    What the landlord did, in fact, was take everything the couple owned that hadn’t been moved -- Sue’s wedding dress, photographs, television sets, Sue’s computer, everything – and dumped it into a landfill, where it was destroyed. Currently, Sue said, the couple is having the incident lawfully investigated by an unnamed entity for the possibility of criminal action on the behalf of the landlord.
    “My jaw just dropped, I couldn’t believe my ears,” Sue said.
    In the new apartment, after Chris had been released from the hospital where he spent six days, more problems developed. Sue abandoned her plans to continue college and started looking for a job. She argued and fought to get food stamps just so they could eat. After a while the couple had to begin choosing between food and bills.
    Then the day came when the utilities were shut off, and the water pump stopped.
    “I began filling up buckets with rain water, but it started to just be unhealthy,” Sue said. “We had to do something, quick.”
    With her husband relying on a cane and a hematoma rapidly growing on his right shin the two of them got on a bus and made the 29 hour trip to Arundel, where Sue’s mother Betty lives.
    “She called me and told me the problem. I was amazed at her strength and her undying love for Chris, she is brilliant but she just couldn’t make it anymore in Georgia, so I told her to come live with me and Mary (Sue’s aunt),” said Betty Saulnier, Sue’s mother.
    The couple gave away their beloved pit-bull, Crash and their cat, Pearl before coming to live in the basement of Saulinier’s Arundel home.
    At first the two slept on a couch, head to toe, but Sue could not stand that arrangement for long.
    “We needed a bed. I couldn’t sleep like that and neither could my husband,” Sue said.
    After a series of failed attempts with air mattresses, Saulnier offered to buy her daughter a bed. Together they found one for $165 in Scarborough, a sale that was going on as a part of an out-going furniture warehouse’s liquidation.
    But transportation was a problem, so through St. Martha Parish Church in Kennebunk, Mary Amlaw (Sue’s aunt) made contact with the Knights of Columbus and asked if they might be able to help the Pauls out.
    The Knights of Columbus at St. Martha Parish Church in Kennebunk is a catholic men’s organization that focuses on doing charitable work. Their 135 members help individuals and groups in need, asking nothing in return.
    “This fall we painted a lady’s house in Arundel and we refitted a home for a local quadriplegic so that he could get around more easily,” said Vincent Gallucci, Grand Knight of The Knights of Columbus.
    The organization sent Bill Butterfield and George Lynch, both Knights, to help Sue get to her desired mattress. But their help didn’t end there.
    “They picked me up and when we saw the advertised mattress in person it was too small, they wouldn’t let me buy it and began offering the store owner more money for a better bed,” Sue said. “They added more than $60 of their own money! I didn’t ask them, I had no words to describe my thanks.”
    On Nov. 14 the two helped her load the bed into Lynch’s truck, drove her back to Arundel and then brought it into the couple’s basement abode.
    “Since we have been in Maine the good things have started to come again, it makes all the difference,” Chris said.
    Chris has had better luck with the doctors in Maine who immediately picked up his fractured ribs on a CAT scan. He is currently undergoing physical therapy and the doctors expect him to be able to return to work in two to three months.
    The workman’s compensation checks are a sore spot for the couple, who cannot understand “how any human being could live off of it.” Sue said she plans to pursue her degree in pre-law and then law school. Her desire; to defend the rights of people who get sick – a part of the reason she is hoping to publish the story entitled “Impact,” about the entire ordeal.    “We are the end result of a system where health care decisions are being taken out of the hands of health care professionals and put into the hands of money hungry insurance companies,” Sue said. “So many people get taken by these companies and they can never see it coming, I want to help people save what they have worked their entire lives for.”
    The Knights of Columbus are currently hosting a “tootsie roll drive” to benefit community members in need in which donators are rewarded with candy at the drive. They will be in Dock Square, Kennebunkport, Dec. 8 for Prelude.