The first call that finally reached Angie Barker came from her sister Becky Zubkoff, who hadn’t been in Caldwell, but still had heard the news:
Justin Hall, Angie’s longtime fiancé and the father of her two kids, had been hurt in a spill.
In harness racing that’s not that unusual. If a driver competes long enough, he’s likely to have some kind of mishap on the track.
In fact, a few years back, Justin’s horse had been slammed into by another entry in Lebanon and the impact had knocked him from his sulky. He broke his left arm — the bone came through the skin — and today it bears a big scar beneath which are two plates and 11 screws.
“At first I thought, ‘Well, it’s probably another broken arm or a leg,’ ” Angie said. “You get a lot of that in situations like this and I figured, at worst, he might be out six or eight weeks and not be able to drive.
“But then Justin’s dad got ahold of me and he asked, ‘Is he allergic to anything?’
“Right away, it hit me. If he’s asking that, it means Justin can’t talk. I said, ‘Is he OK?’ And he just said, ‘Justin is hurt. He’s hurt bad.’ His dad was in tears and I knew it wasn’t good.”
She was right.
In the third race on that Aug. 25 card in 2009, Justin was driving Impatient Misfit, a 2-year-old filly pacer he had trained, when — possibly because the hobble came loose — she suddenly broke stride in the first quarter and fell.
He was flung violently from the sulky and hit the track head first. Although he was wearing a helmet, the impact still was catastrophic.
And immediately after that Justin had been hit by a trailing horse, Golden Fizz, which he not only trained as well, but which was driven by Angie’s nephew, Shawn Barker II.
Justin suffered severe brain trauma.
“Doctors described it like shaken baby syndrome,” Angie said. “When his head hit, his brain just kept shaking.”
At first he was rushed by ambulance to a regional hospital in nearby Cambridge. Then he was taken by life-flight 80 miles to the Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus.
He was put into a medical-induced coma in hopes of reducing his brain swelling and he ended up trapped in that netherworld for some six weeks.
It was a devastating scenario the racing world has seen far too often. Every year harness drivers are severely hurt in spills and sometimes — be it the legendary Bill Haughton at Yonkers Raceway in 1986 or Dani Lewis at Cranbourne in Melbourne, Australia just last month — they are even killed on the track.
In the past 11 months, drivers have been severely injured in several crashes, including Harrah’s Philadelphia, Yonkers Raceway, Batavia Downs last month (where two were hurt), the Wayne County Fair just a few weeks ago and just last week in France.
During those initial weeks, Angie wasn’t sure how, or even if, Justin was going to survive.
“Every day you’d hope for something, but as time went on and there wasn’t a change, you wondered if he was ever going to be OK,” she said quietly.
“In the beginning things looked pretty bleak,” said Becky, who runs her own racing stable with her husband near Toledo. “Everything was touch and go.”
The racing fraternity reached out to help. There were several benefits and fund-raisers.
Drivers and trainers competing at a Labor Day program at Scioto Downs agreed to donate their 5 percent commission on purse earnings. A collection was taken up at the Standardbred Horse Sales in Harrisburg, Pa., to help with medical expenses.
“So many people stepped up,” Angie said. “I had people walk up and say, ‘Here’s $20…Here’s $100.’ One time someone just came up and gave me $200 to help. Checks came in the mail from people I didn’t even know. Even people you didn’t consider friends or you didn’t necessarily get along with offered help. That’s the thing about horsemen. In a time of need, they reach out to you.”
When Justin was finally brought out of the coma, he had to learn how to talk, to walk, to think things through again. He spent a month of rehab at Dodd Hall at OSU and as that ended Angie said she heard some discussion about sending him to a nursing home facility to recover.
Instead, she brought him home and the first place she took him was the barn:
“He wasn’t sure — he just wasn’t able to make decisions then — but I said, ‘C’mon, we got to stop and feed the horses.’ I ended up bringing him every day because I thought it’d be good therapy. And it was.
“We had some horses in there that we’d had for years and when they saw him they kind of looked at him and sniffed as if to say, ‘Where you been?’ ”
Long road back
Justin, now 40, said he learned how to race from his grandfather, the successful and much-respected horseman Harry Richardson, who stabled his standardbreds at the Ross County Fairgrounds:
“When I was a real little boy, way before I could jog by myself, I’d sit in his lap as he took a horse around the track. Whenever I wasn’t in school, I was with my grandpa. He was my hero.”
Justin said he drove his first race, a county fair matinee, when he was 14. Within a couple of years he was driving regularly and beginning to make a name for himself.
Angie’s dad , Ron Barker, is a horseman, too.
“When I was a little kid, maybe 6 or 7, we lived between Chillicothe and Waverly,” she said. “Dad had a little jog track at home and he used to let us jog horses by ourselves.”
Later when her dad trained at the fairgrounds, Justin began to drive for him.
“We met when we were younger, but we didn’t start dating until after I was 18,” she said.
They’ve been together since and a couple of years before the accident they were experiencing some real racing success.
In 2007, Justin had 90 wins in 551 races. Among 90 more second-place finishes that year was his runner-up piloting of Nite Train in the $100,000 Ohio Sire Stakes final in Cleveland. By 2009, he and Angie had a stable of 15 standardbreds, several that were showing real promise. That was never more evident than the day he took seven horses to the Jackson County Fair and drove six to victory.
The season he was injured, Justin had a Universal Driving Rating of .304. Similar to a batting average in baseball but calculated by a driver’s finishes in the money, anything over .300 is considered excellent.
When Justin got hurt, all that changed. He had dropped his most comprehensive insurance just a month prior to the accident and though the family still got help from a U.S. Trotting Association program, they came close to losing everything.
Angie sold several of their horses and began to run the business, while also caring for the two kids — Justin Ryan and Jaiden — and spending as much time as possible helping her fiance try to work through his physical limitations and mental fog.
“I don’t know how she did it,” Becky said. “She didn’t get enough credit for what she did.”
While he had been in a coma, Justin had fallen out of bed and injured his right arm, the fist of which he began to pull up toward his collarbone. Soon the muscles contracted and that became a problem if he ever hoped to drive again.
Eventually Angie was given a special harness cart with two seats. She put Justin in one and began to take him around the track as she worked their horses. It was a long process that lasted a couple of years — he also struggled making cognitive decisions — but finally Justin was able to try driving on his own.
“He didn’t just have to get stronger to handle the horses, he had to make new pathways in his brain to be able to think things out,” Angie said. “Finally, though, he was ready.”
‘Where I belong’
The other night, Justin was in the paddock at Dayton Raceway.
Just 5-foot-7 and 160 pounds, he has a thin, black moustache, a receding hairline and an easy smile. He wore the signature maroon and gold silks of his grandfather, but across the bottom sleeves was his own name written in script. He was yet to put on his gold-lensed driving goggles, but his black boots already were mud-stained.
He would be driving Your My Secret, a 3-year-old bay filly owned by Angela and her dad, out of the eight hole in the second race.
The horse, warmed up earlier, now stood in her stall, covered by a maroon blanket that read Harry Richardson Memorial, a race run in his grandfather’s honor each year at the Ross County Fair.
“I felt nervous when I first started driving again, but it feels good now,” Justin said. “I didn’t want to stay away from this. This is me. This is where I belong.”
He started driving again, on a limited basis, two years ago. He did some races at the 2013 Scioto Downs meet and a few earlier this year at Miami Valley Raceway. He’s also driven at some county fairs and now plans to race at Dayton whenever they can make the card.
While Your My Secret — returning to the track for her first pari-mutuel race after a recent injury — couldn’t overcome the tough outside post position and finished sixth, Justin fared much better at the Fairfield Country Fair in Lancaster Friday afternoon.
He drove in three races, and along with a fifth- and third-place finish, he won as a catch driver with Triple Lane Spice, which is trained by Angie’s sister Becky.
It was just his third victory — the other two were two years ago at Washington Court House and the Miami County Fair in Troy — since coming back from injury.
While he’s slowly regaining some of his old self on the track, he’s doing the same away from the game, too.
“When he first came out of his coma, I even had him eating pea soup,” Angie laughed. “Then he remembered he didn’t like vegetables. He really only likes what I call kid’s food — pizza, Chicken McNuggets, stuff like that.”
Justin was on the other side of the stall and pretended not to hear, so Angie decided to have a little more fun:
“And early on he was able to remember the size of equipment horses wore back in 1998, but he couldn’t remember my birthday. I’m not quite sure what the correlation is, but then again I’m not sure he ever remembered my birthday before the accident either.”
A faint smile appeared on Justin’s face.
“Your birthday is June 9th,” he said softly.
The comeback continues.
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