These teens helped victims of a wreck. Then a father helped recognize them as heroes.
The four Charlotte Catholic High School students are standing just a few yards from where the violent car wreck took place, and they appear slightly uncomfortable as they take turns batting away the notion that they played any sort of extraordinary role in tending to the victims.
“It’s incredibly humbling to be called heroes,” says one, 18-year-old senior Tony Nassar, as cars whoosh past on Ballantyne Commons Parkway in south Charlotte. “But we’re not trying to go for that at all. I mean, we just responded to something.”
“I think anyone would have done the same thing,” adds Maddy Petho, a 17-year-old junior.
Here’s the thing, though: In the nearly two months since the accident, Chad Simpson has held firmly to the belief that there’s no way just about anyone would have done what these teens did to help his own teenage daughters and his 66-year-old mother-in-law, who nearly died from her injuries.
As a result, Simpson also held firmly to the belief that these teens deserved to be recognized for the actions they took and the bravery and compassion they showed on that late-December afternoon.
And while this is a belief he clings to a little less firmly, Simpson does seem to think on some level that all of this — from what happened that day to the slow but serendipitous manner in which he was finally able to get these teenagers their due — might just be fate.
‘They were literally that good’
It was the Saturday before Christmas, and the sun had begun to dip in the western sky.
Terry Heckenkamp was turning left out of her Ballantyne Meadows neighborhood as she and her granddaughters — Harmony, 19, a UNC Chapel Hill student, and Faith, a Providence High sophomore — took a quick break from baking Christmas cookies to make a quick run to Harris Teeter.
“The last thing I remember,” Faith says, “was the horn.”
According to the police report, the white Mercedes-Benz hurtled up over the rise in the bend on Ballantyne Commons at 80 mph, twice the posted legal limit, as it headed away from Ballantyne Village toward Lancaster Highway. The Mercedes’ driver was able to brake slightly when he saw Heckenkamp pulling out, but his car still plowed into her driver’s-side front wheel well at about 60 mph, and the punishing impact sent the Buick and its passengers up over the curb and onto a grassy knoll several dozen feet away.
Heckenkamp and her granddaughters all were knocked unconscious.
Maddy Petho drove up over the same rise as the Mercedes just seconds after the crash. In the car with her were Tony Nassar, 17-year-old Charlotte Catholic junior Lucy Martin, and a fourth teenager — Nations Ford High School student Josh Perry — on their way to take a spin through Ballantyne Meadows, where Nassar’s family used to live.
Anthony Johnson, an 18-year-old Charlotte Catholic senior who was heading home from his part-time job, was a couple of cars behind them. It was merely a coincidence that a group of three Charlotte Catholic students was in the same place at the same time as a fourth Charlotte Catholic student. The wreck happened on a Saturday, during holiday break, and the high school is four miles away from the crash site. Anyway, Maddy and Anthony both pulled their vehicles to the side of the road, and all five didn’t hesitate as they got out and raced toward the victims.
Faith Simpson, who was in the back seat, regained consciousness fairly quickly and was able to get herself out of the SUV. Her sister, who was in the front, was out a little longer and needed to be assisted. But their grandmother was by far the most seriously injured.
After Tony, Anthony and Josh helped maneuver Heckenkamp out of the vehicle (by reclining her seat and lifting her over and out the back door, since her door had been crushed shut), they noticed her pulse was weak; on the advisement of another adult who had come forward to help, Tony says, the four of them each took a turn administering CPR as they waited for paramedics to arrive.
Tony says she became responsive about 90 seconds after they started CPR.
Meanwhile, the sisters’ cellphones were missing, so Maddy let Faith use her iPhone to call her mother. As they waited for their parents to get there, Faith — obviously shaken up and worried about her grandmother — was sobbing uncontrollably, so Maddy wrapped her in her arms and provided a shoulder to cry on. Harmony couldn’t stop shaking, so Tony took off his sweatshirt and put it on her.
At one point, both the Samaritans and the victims say, the father of the driver who caused the crash arrived at the scene and aggressively insisted on taking cellphone video of the girls and their grandmother for unclear reasons. Chad Simpson says that when he and his wife Lyndsey showed up, the students were standing in a protective circle around his daughters to shield them from the man.
“It was incredible,” says Simpson, who chased the man off. But even more incredible, he says, is that after he and his wife gave their girls hugs, Harmony and Faith “went straight back to (the students) because, I mean, they were literally that good, and they were that helpful to them.”
The wreck had closed the westbound lanes of Ballantyne Commons Parkway entirely, so traffic was at a standstill. At one point, Simpson says, an irritated woman got out of her car, came over, and said, “Ugh, do you know how much longer this is gonna take?”
“There were adults everywhere,” Faith recalls. And like this woman, “a lot of them looked angry at the situation, and weren’t very helpful.” Anthony, Josh, Lucy, Maddy and Tony, she says, were able to put her and her sister more at ease than they might have been otherwise.
As adults huffed, with the sky darkening, those five started using their cellphone lights to help search for the girls’ glasses. And as the Simpsons prepared to head to the hospital to be with Lyndsey’s mom and to get the girls checked out, Harmony tried to give Tony his sweatshirt back.
He told her to keep it, insisting that she needed it more than he did.
‘Putting their faith into action’
Terry Heckenkamp would spend the next 10 days in the ICU, and 10 more in the regular part of the hospital. Nine broken ribs. A punctured lung. Internal bleeding in her chest. She needed two surgeries and had four blood transfusions.
The girls both suffered concussions.
But at the same time he was concerned about his family, Chad Simpson couldn’t get these other kids out of his mind. “So much so,” he says, “that when we got home that night, I was telling my wife, ‘I wish we could find them. The city should give out medals to these people.’”
As it turns out, that same night, Maddy Petho requested to follow Faith Simpson on Instagram. That, of course, meant Maddy had remembered Faith’s name, but it’s also key that Faith immediately remembered Maddy’s — because if neither had been able to, this story might have ended with the individuals involved.
“Hey! You’re the girl that helped me and my sister earlier today right?” Faith wrote in a message to Maddy.
“Yess I was just checking in making sure you guys were good. Praying for y’all,” Maddy replied.
After Faith showed her dad, and it became clear from Maddy’s account that she was a student at Charlotte Catholic, Chad Simpson was suddenly overcome by emotion.
Back when he was a student at UNC Charlotte, Simpson had studied religion, and in early adulthood identified as “a Protestant Buddhist, who loved Judaism”; but he became disillusioned with religion and took more than a decade off from going to church.
Until this past fall.
In September, Simpson decided he was ready to reconnect with religion, and wanted to take a new path — so he and his wife enrolled together in what’s called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (or RCIA), a months-long process during which prospective converts to Catholicism learn about the faith. As part of the process, they joined St. Peter’s Catholic Church in uptown.
But the holidays got in the way, and his mother-in-law’s condition was fairly serious, and it would wind up being 2-1/2 weeks before he really got a chance to think about finding a way to get some recognition for the teens who helped his daughters.
Finally, on Jan. 7, he asked some friends at St. Peter’s who he should tell about this, and they encouraged him to contact the principal at the school. That night, he emailed Kurt Telford.
The next morning, Telford summoned Maddy — the only one mentioned by name in Simpson’s email — to his office.
Maddy had no idea what was going on. “I had this feeling of like, ‘Oh God, what’d I do now?’” she recalls.
“It’s all good,” Telford assured her when she got there. He smiled. “It’s all good.”
By the end of the day, he had spoken with and thanked and commended all four of the Charlotte Catholic students involved.
He’d also replied to Simpson’s email: “They are great kids who stepped up when they saw someone in need,” Telford wrote. “They were putting their faith into action!”
Telford felt, however, that thanking them and commending them personally wasn’t enough. So on Jan. 31, before a faculty-student basketball game, Telford read part of Simpson’s letter to the entire student body.
“I just thought it was a good example,” he said, “There are a lot of kids who do a lot of good things every day that go unnoticed. And this would have gone unnoticed. The kids didn’t tell us.”
And, he says, it’s as good an example for older adults as it is for younger people.
“It gave me a moment to pause and think about when I see somebody who’s in distress,” the principal says. “Do I go, ‘Oh, you know, the police will handle it,’ or, ‘Oh, somebody’s already there.’ They could have easily done that. But it made me think about, ‘All right, what’s my reaction when I see things like that? Do I lend aid, or do I worry about whether I’m gonna be late to where I’m going?’”
With that in mind, on Feb. 3, Telford took it all a step further, sharing the story in a letter that went out electronically to every parent at Charlotte Catholic.
What does it all mean?
So, while it’s not a medal from the city, Chad Simpson is happy that they were celebrated by their school, happy that the letter that Telford sent out wound up being forwarded by a parent to the Observer.
“You hear so many negative things,” he says, “about that generation: ‘Teenagers today, they’re so busy on their phones, they’re too wrapped up in themselves, all they care about is themselves, all they care about is their phones. TikTok. Instagram.’”
It’s nice, he says, to get an opportunity to highlight how reality can be different from perception.
“I mean, they could have drove off,” he says of the five students. “They could have easily just gone around and drove off and gotten where they needed to go. They didn’t. They pulled over and jumped out of the car and started helping immediately.”
“These kids were like calm, cool and collected, and they were so helpful,” Simpson says. “I don’t know that grown adults would have done half as well as they did. And the fact that they’re my kids’ ages, and that they could relate ... that made such a difference.”
As for what role fate might have played in all of this?
Well, as is often the case in stories like these, if you look for little coincidences, you can find them: Maddy’s mother is named Faith, for instance, just like Faith Simpson. While Faith and Harmony Simpson don’t live with their grandmother, Maddy and Lucy found resonance in the fact that they both have a grandmother living at home with them.
And then, Chad Simpson says, there’s that whole Catholic connection.
“Call it fate, call it the hand of God, call it — I have no idea what you want to call it,” he says. “But it moved me. I can’t express what it means to me. What it means to other people? Well, that’s for them to decide. ... Am I gonna sit here and say, ‘God wouldn’t have intervened and those Catholic kids wouldn’t have jumped out if I wasn’t in RCIA?’ Not for a second.
“But it is highly wonderful. It is beautiful that we ain’t been to church in a long, long, long, long time, and then we start going to a Catholic church and a bunch of Catholic kids jump out and save my kids. It is amazing. I mean, what are the odds?”
