Man Survives Being Impaled By Tree

It's an incredible tale of survival about a man, a tree and what happened to make the two become one. There is good luck, there are miracles and what happened to Jack Wier proves they are not the same thing.

Jack and his wife Julie raise alpacas on their farm in Fairview Heights. On a spring day in 2007, Jack experienced something astounding, only 16 acres from their house. He had been using a Bobcat to clear some trees when he hit a large cottonwood that hit back.

A broken limb came flying in under the roll bar, spearing Jack through the belly with a piece of wood 20 feet long and six inches thick.

"I've always had a pretty high tolerance for pain. I had no pain, I had none," Wier said.

Still, he knew the situation was desperate. That's when Jack remembered the military mantra he relied on during his 38 years in the army.

"You define the problem...you identify alternatives... you accumulate relevant information... and then you make a decision. My problem was I got this tree in me," explained the tree accident victim.

Jack also had another problem. His leg was so swollen that he could not get into his pants pocket to reach his cell phone. So, as they say in the Army, he identified an alternative.

Julie explained "When this came in it ripped his pants and so he could see the pocket of the jeans because his pants were ripped...."

"And so with that aerial, I started pushing it to make a hole, and fortunately after about five minutes I was able to make a hole, pulled the cell phone out and got on the phone and I'm telling you by the grace of God she answered on the first ring," Jack added.

The challenge for the rescue team was to carefully remove Jack from the bobcat, without removing the limb from jack. "They cut it at about eight feet with a chain saw and they determined they couldn't get an eight foot tree into the helicopter," Julie laughed.

So they cut it to three feet and flew him to St. Louis University Hospital. Dr. Carl Freeman, also a military man with experience as a battlefield surgeon, led the team of doctors who took the tree limb out of Jack.

The first step was to determine which organs had been damaged. The jaw-dropping answer was none. Dr. Freeman explained "It literally just slid along them, went right along them and slid along them and pushed them out of the way."

Julie continued to explain "The doctor came out and he said we removed the tree. We don't hear this everyday and then she said and it missed every major organ...and she chuckled... and our oldest son said doctor what do you call that..." Jack added "She said... a miracle."

The limb missed Jack's spine by 5/16 of an inch, about the thickness of a pencil.

Jack has always believed in miracles. He also believes his statue of the Virgin Mary, a family heirloom which happens to sit just a few feet from the scene of the accident, had something to do with his survival.

This is not the first time the Wier's have been touched by a miracle. In 1983, Julie was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease and told she had six months to live, but her cancer went into remission.

"When you have a terrible experience something very tragic... horrible that happens in your life it is there to prepare you for the next horrible tragic thing that is going to happen in your life because it is not an if, it's a when," Julie said.

You might think people who have been through what they have been through would want to distance themselves from that awful day. The Wier's choose to embrace it. Their son Dominic wrote a song about his family's miracles. The song says "An old tree nearly took his life... he was gone almost saw the light, but God granted us a miracle and he survived..."

Speaking of seeing the light, on Jack's desk, there now sits a lamp his son-in-law made from pieces of the tree that almost killed jack.

At the St. Louis Zoo, you'll find two of the Wier's alpacas, named for the surgeons who saved Jack's life, Doc Andrus and Doc Freeman.

The keepsake that means the most however, is the simplest of them all. A large section of the limb left behind from the rescue. They keep it on their patio and it is a weathering reminder of how both luck and miracles saved a branch on the Wier family tree.