Mother of Berryhill baseball player injured
BY MIKE BROWN World Sports Writer
Sunday, May 13, 2012
5/13/12 at 5:39 PM
The mother of a Berryhill baseball player suffered extensive injuries in a fall along Interstate 40 late Saturday night after her son played in the Class 4A championship game in Shawnee.
Gina Jackson was in the OU Medical Center in Oklahoma City on Sunday, awaiting surgeries later this week to insert pins in two cracked vertebrae in her lower back and another in her fractured pelvis, husband Kevin Jackson said.
She also had two cracked neck vertebrae, a punctured lung, bleeding on the brain, a gash on the side of her head and a fractured wrist, Kevin Jackson said.
“She’s in a lot of pain, but she’s a tough gal. She’s 10 times tougher than I’ve ever been,” her husband said, adding that the situation is not considered life-threatening.
The Jacksons are longtime Berryhill High supporters. Their son, Zach Jackson, is a standout junior pitcher who saw action in both left field and on the mound in the Chiefs’ 2-1 loss to Hilldale in Saturday’s 4A championship game.
The Jacksons were traveling home on I-40 when they stopped around 9:15 p.m. Saturday to investigate a vehicle that had caught fire about 10 miles east of Shawnee.
Kevin Jackson said his wife insisted they stop “because with all the Berryhill people driving home from the game, she said it might be somebody we knew.”
On foot in near total darkness after leaving her vehicle, Gina Jackson did not see a dropoff along the roadside where another road runs under I-40, and fell approximately 35 feet, hitting the pavement below.
Kevin Jackson said he did not see his wife’s fall and did not realize for several minutes what had happened to her while he helped others tend to a person pulled from the wrecked vehicle.
“Then, I heard somebody say there’s somebody else out here. They must have been ejected (from the wrecked vehicle),” he said. “When we got to her, she was coherent and she kept apologizing. She said she couldn’t believe what she had done.”
Gina Jackson was first taken to Unity Health Center in Shawnee and later transported to the OU Medical Center because it has the state’s only level 1 trauma center, according to the American College of Surgeons.
