These Appleton Boy Scouts are called heroes. But many just want to remember why they were on the train in the first place.
Just days after he was on an Amtrak train that derailed in Missouri, Eli Skrypczak wanted to go to football practice.
His mom, Laura, said she and her husband, Dan, had gone through trauma counseling with Eli after the accident and were encouraged to let Eli go back to doing the things he’d usually do.
A sense of normalcy would be good for him.
Laura had her concerns, especially since he was dealing with some shoulder and upper back pain from the derailment. But she sent him off to practice with a reminder that he could always call her if he needed to leave early.
He made it about halfway through, but then found it too difficult to lift weights, so he called and asked to be picked up.
Normalcy would have to wait a little while.
Eli was one of 22 Boy Scouts and leaders from Appleton Troops 12 and 73 who — on their way home from a once-in-a-lifetime scouting trip to New Mexico — were on the Amtrak train that derailed in late June in Missouri after hitting a dump truck. The accident left four people dead — three on the train and the truck driver.
What followed was an unexpected overnight stay in Missouri, a delayed trip home to Wisconsin and a torrent of media attention that left the scouts with a new label.
Heroes.
Now, weeks later, the attention has mostly faded and the scouts, ages 14 to 17, have navigated back to their routines.
But what have they taken away from the derailment and its surrounding events? How have their lives changed — and how have they not changed? In interviews with scouts and parents, we sought to find out.
This is a story about that group of teenage boys and their leaders who were thrust into a tragic situation that tested their skills and resolve, while propelling them into the spotlight — and what happened after it was all over. Some of what still lingers in the boys' minds may surprise you.
On a long trip home, they’re trying to rest on the train. Then, they hear a bang
The train was an hour or two late. Troop 12 scout Eli Schultz said he was relieved when it finally showed up at about 6:30 p.m. at their stop in New Mexico. The Appleton scouts and leaders boarded and set themselves up in the last car of the train.
An Amtrak ride from New Mexico to Chicago can take between 25 and 30 hours. After hiking dozens of miles over the last seven days at the Philmont Scout Ranch, many of them were using the train ride home to relax and get what sleep they could.
By now, a lot has been written about the derailment that happened at 12:42 p.m. on June 27 in Mendon, Missouri, about 84 miles northeast of Kansas City.
We know at least 150 people were taken to local hospitals for injuries ranging from minor to serious. And we know the Missouri Department of Transportation released a plan earlier this year citing a need to improve safety at the rail crossing.
Looking back now, here's how the scouts group remembers it.
“You're already on the train for, let's say, 18 hours by that point, and it was not a good night's sleep,” Eli’s dad and Troop 12 assistant scoutmaster, Matt Schultz, said. “So we're all kind of groggy, and I was trying to take a nap actually.”
Troop 12 scout Logan Poelzer was listening to music when he heard a bang. Everything jerked forward and a few items got knocked off the table in front of him.
“I thought we hit something, but it wasn’t serious,” he said.
Then there was a second bang and the train started tipping. That’s when he knew something was wrong.
Eli Schultz was in the aisle, picking up the items that had flown forward from the first jolt, when the train started to tip.
“I felt like I was in a washing machine,” he said.
Eli had been sitting on the left side of the train, which eventually became the ceiling as the train tipped onto its right side. At that point, everything was chaos, he said. The train was on its side and people were sprawled everywhere.
Once the train came to a stop, Matt Schultz and his son quickly checked themselves for injuries before turning to help those around them.
Matt and the scout leader sitting next to him had gone through a wilderness and remote first aid training as required by Boy Scouts of America — in case they needed to administer first aid in a remote situation.
“And we basically said, ‘We knew how to handle a situation.’ So I told him, ‘John, I'm gonna go left,’ which was toward the front of the car, and assess the people to the rear. And we triage the primary injuries of what's going on and need attention first.
“Thankfully, in our car, there weren’t gruesome injuries, but there were certainly injuries: back issues, broken arms, shoulder, ribs, concussions, chest pains. … So things that we could deal with. Thankfully, nobody passed on our car, but we were able to just kind of spring into action at that point.”
Once they all got their own footing back, the scouts fanned out and started doing what they could to help people.
Mason Giesler from Troop 73 helped transport injured people to a staging area and directed some to an area where they could wait for a bus to pick them up.
Logan Poelzer and Eli Schultz went to other train cars and helped pull people out through the emergency windows.
Though their dads were on the trip, Logan and Eli said both they made calls to their moms to let them know what happened and that they were OK.
A dad on the trip sent a text to some of the other parents, telling them there had been a train crash and that it was pretty serious.
Laura Skrypczak got that text and started searching online and flipping through the channels on her television. She was looking for any morsel of information she could get.
After almost an hour, she saw footage of the crash. She could see her son, Eli, running across the tracks, so she knew he was OK.
Logan said they weren’t the only ones helping. Many uninjured passengers were pitching in to help their fellow travelers.
“It’s kinda cool that we’re getting the attention, but we weren’t the only ones helping,” he said.
In the immediate aftermath, the scouts get help — and a frenzy of media attention for their heroics
Mendon, Missouri, is over an 8-hour drive from Appleton, so jumping in the car and driving there wasn’t a feasible option for parents. However, they harnessed the power of social media and the scouting community to find surrogates to help their sons.
Scouting parents in Missouri stepped in to help Troops 12 and 73 have what they would need for their impromptu stay after some of them walked away from the train without so much as a change of clothes.
One scout mom in Columbia, Missouri — 90 minutes from the accident — saw a Facebook post and said she could drive up and help the scouts. That mom picked up Mason Giesler, who ended up getting checked out at a different hospital than the rest of the boys and would have been a two-hour walk to the hotel where the troops were staying.
Matt Schultz and Logan Poelzer said the scout families in Missouri made sure the boys had everything from clean socks to deodorant to have a comfortable night after the chaos of the afternoon.
At the same time, it didn't take long for the story of the heroic Boy Scouts from Appleton to circulate in the media, both in Wisconsin and nationally.
Besides The Post-Crescent, TV stations in Green Bay and Milwaukee covered it extensively.
The boys also were seeing and reading their names on television stations and in newspapers across the country. The Washington Post did a feature on Eli Skrypczak, who tended to the driver of the dump truck that collided with the train before he ultimately died from the accident.
The next day, after a planned bus trip home was scuttled when no bus driver could be found, the group flew back to Wisconsin.
The troops decided to "go quiet" on the first day back home, to give everyone space for the adrenaline to settle and, as Matt Schultz described it, savor life and family.
Staying quiet didn’t last for long, though. The first few days back were a whirlwind, Matt said. Getting back to the calm of home was nice, but there still was a media frenzy to deal with.
On one day, the troops did four television interviews, something Matt said was “very draining.”
The attention has subsided some since, though the group was recognized at Experimental Aircraft Association annual AirVenture convention in Oshkosh at the end of July.
Back at home, the scouts try to adjust. Many want to talk about their New Mexico experience
It’s impossible to summarize these past weeks in just a few words. The first couple days, Eli Schultz said he was texting with friends, having conversations along the lines of “Oh, my gosh. I can’t believe that happened.”
Now, if he sees a family member he hasn’t seen since before the accident, they ask him about it. It’s also been “surreal,” he said, being on all the news outlets.
Everybody from the group who was in the hospital is home and recovering well, Matt Schultz said. Two troop leaders and at least one boy have had to have surgery for injuries, including broken ribs, a punctured lung, shattered vertebrae and a torn biceps.
Just as the physical injuries are healing, though at different paces, the scouts and adults who were on the train are coping from the emotional toll in different ways.
Some boys used counseling services provided through the Appleton Area School District.
Many of the scouts aren’t interested in regularly rehashing the details of the derailment, instead, they want to relive the once-in-a-lifetime hiking trip they completed before the accident — the reason they were even riding cross-country on Amtrak.
When Isaac Berken of Troop 73 got home, the first question he asked his family was if they wanted to see his photos from Philmont.
“After picking him up from the airport, he was home not even 15 or 20 minutes and he was asking if we wanted to see the pictures,” Sarah Berken, Isaac’s mom, said.
Isaac said he was amazed that he actually got to experience the 215 miles of rugged northern New Mexico wilderness.
“A lot of scouts describe it as the pinnacle of their scouting career,” Matt Schultz said.
The scouts agreed that the trip was an awesome bonding experience. Since two troops came together for the trip, some of them didn’t know each other well at the start. That wasn’t the case by the end.
But some scouts, like Dean Seaborn of Troop 73, said the accident has overshadowed the trip.
“I’m only thinking about the train and not Philmont,” he said.
In the end, ‘a certain place for a certain reason’
Most of the scouts said they aren’t talking about the accident that frequently in their daily lives anymore.
Having both been on the train, Matt and Eli Schultz said it’s nice to have each other to talk about their experience with someone who understands.
Matt said he’s processing the event differently than Eli. He has been more reflective on the experience and is still trying to deconstruct what happened. It doesn't happen every day, but sometimes he’ll still ask Eli, “Hey, what happened after this or that?”
For him, it’s helpful to think through it and talk through the sequence of events. And Eli, Matt said, knows he can go to him to talk at any point; something Eli agreed with.
Like anybody who lives through a tragedy, Matt said, he does play through hypotheticals in his mind.
One of the biggest ones: If the train wouldn’t have been late, maybe they would have missed the dump truck. But he doesn’t like to let his mind linger there for too long.
“When it comes down to it, we get put in a certain place for a certain reason,” Matt said.
He said he thinks about that idea a lot.
Reach AnnMarie Hilton at ahilton@gannett.com or 920-370-8045. Follow her on Twitter at @hilton_annmarie.
This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: Appleton Boy Scouts' journey continues after train derailment heroics
