Her dog rescued her from depression. Then 3 strangers had to rush to save his life.

Sinclair Larson doesn’t remember arriving home after finishing a shift at her part-time job late in the day on Nov. 8.

She doesn’t remember eating dinner; she doesn’t remember heading out to take her beloved Australian Shepherd for their nightly 2-mile walk; and she doesn’t remember pressing the button to activate the flashing yellow lights at the crosswalk at Franklin Street near Carolina Avenue, which is barely a block away from the little house in Chapel Hill that she shares with three other students at the University of North Carolina.

It might actually all be for the best, however, because it also means she doesn’t have to remember this: At just after 7 p.m. that Sunday, Chapel Hill police say, Larson and her dog Jasper were struck by a vehicle, whose driver failed to yield to their right of way.

Just imagining the accident sends a shiver up her back.

Yet, when she thinks about what happened next, the heroic act of the three kind-hearted strangers who rushed Jasper to the animal hospital — something she was unable to do herself as she lay on the ground moaning, her hair drenched with blood — she smiles.

“They saved his life,” says her father, Jim, as he stands next to his daughter on the front porch of the Larsons’ home in south Charlotte, just five days after the accident.

“Yeah,” Sinclair says, looking content, even with a big piece of gauze taped to her forehead and a purple bruise framing her right eye.

“She would not be doing this well if that had not happened,” her dad says.

“I keep thinking in my head, like, ‘What would this be like right now like if he hadn’t made it like through it?’” says Sinclair, who in spring 2019 established herself as a rising star on the University of Tennessee’s swim team, who in fall 2019 left the sport after a battle with depression, and who this past March adopted Jasper on her way to reclaiming inner peace.

“I don’t know how I would have made it through that time at the hospital. It would have been a real struggle for me. ... I’m just very thankful that I didn’t have to know what it would feel like for him to have not made it.”

And Jasper indeed came very close to not making it.

Her life before Jasper

Before Sinclair Larson had Jasper, she had swimming.

It was in her veins: Her mother, Karen Larson, swam for South Mecklenburg High School’s state championship team in 1985, and Sinclair followed her into the pool at a young age, joining her first swim team at age 6 and eventually becoming a South Meck star herself.

In January 2018, as a senior and team captain for the Sabres, she led her squad to the SoMeck7 conference championship, winning both the 100 backstroke and 200 individual medley titles in meet record times, then adding a 4A state title the next month, also in the 100 back.

Sinclair (who also swam for club team SwimMAC Carolina) continued her success at Tennessee, making the Southeastern Conference’s all-freshman team and earning All-America honors as an honorable mention.

The trouble began last fall, after she suffered a torn labrum in her hip, an injury she says happened in the weight room and sidelined her for almost the entire fall.

“That set off a cycle of depression for me,” Larson says. “When I was unable to compete in swimming, I just got into a really unhealthy head space. I’m someone who always wants to be the best. I’m a perfectionist. And I think those qualities just led me into a downward spiral.”

Eventually, she says, she was barely eating or sleeping.

She started to see a therapist at Tennessee to try to work through it, and her parents were aware that she was struggling with depression. When she came home for the holidays last year, Jim Larson recalls, “We questioned whether it was right for her to go back. But she’s very, very driven. Wants to do things the right way. She says, ‘I started school there, I need to finish school there.’ So she went back.

“And it was about, what, 10 days later?”

“They sent me back home like 10 days later after that,” Sinclair says.

“I think I just put a lot of my identity into succeeding in swimming, and didn’t really like see any value in myself outside of that. So when the swimming did start to be taken away because of the injury, I didn’t know what else I had left, and I just felt like there’s not even any point in like living anymore if I can’t swim. So I just went into a very dark place.”

Upon returning to Charlotte, she spent more than a month at HopeWay, a residential mental health treatment facility on Sharon Road.

For the sake of her well-being, she had determined, competitive swimming would be a thing of the past.

Instead, in March, she found herself competing for a dog.

‘I had to get that dog’

Sinclair met Jasper through an old college friend of her mom’s, who was fostering the then-10-month old pup for an Australian Shepherd rescue organization.

There was chemistry from the start.

“We just had a bond right away,” Sinclair recalls. “He was just hugging me and laying at my feet.” (“And when we say he hugs,” her dad Jim adds, “we’re not kidding. He gets up on two feet and he takes his other two and he puts them around you, and he puts his head in you.”)

On the spot, she was struck by the idea that he could be her emotional support dog, since one thing she would really need as she navigated her recovery was emotional support. His warm, positive energy, she thought, could help heal her.

She learned there were other people eager to adopt him, but Sinclair was determined: “I just knew,” she says, “I had to get that dog.”

After making her case and proving her dedication to dog ownership, she was crowned the winner in the competition to formally rescue Jasper. And then Jasper began to rescue her right back.

Every hug — and she says her dog has an endless amount of hugs in him — would bring a smile. The bond would deepen, though, too. Over time, Sinclair and her father say, Jasper developed the ability to detect whenever she’s feeling sad or anxious, and when he senses it, he immediately runs to her and jumps up on her lap.

They became inseparable, both while she was at home with her family in Charlotte for five months and then after she moved to Chapel Hill in August to get a fresh start at UNC.

“(Throughout) quarantine, it was just me and him all the time,” Sinclair says. “He sleeps in my bed with me every night.”

Or he did, at least, until the night of Nov. 8.

Strangers to the rescue

Jill and Scott Reid were eating dinner in their backyard with their daughter Erin, Erin’s new husband, and Erin’s new in-laws when they were startled by what Jill calls a loud thud followed by the yelp of a dog.

They went out front and looked up the street, she says, to see people gathered around someone laying on the ground. As they moved closer, they saw it was a young woman, that she was covered in blood, and that two people were tending to her. When Jill asked a bystander whether 911 had been called, the man replied affirmatively, before adding that the two tending to the young woman had identified themselves as paramedics.

The yelp, she learned, belonged to the young woman’s dog; and the dog, the people gathered around the young woman said, had been killed.

Jill and Scott hustled back down the street to find the dog on its side in the street. He was at least a hundred feet away from his owner, which meant the impact had been immensely powerful. But Jill says that although the dog was otherwise motionless, his eyes were open, and he was blinking them.

He wasn’t dead.

“If this dog’s gonna make it,” Scott said, “we’ve got to get it to an emergency room.”

They moved as fast but as gently as they could, loading the dog into the back of Scott’s old Land Rover Defender while Erin used her phone to figure out where the nearest animal hospital was. Finding one open after 7 p.m. on a Sunday was tricky, but she landed on a Triangle Veterinary Referral Hospitals location next to Duke University in Durham, about nine miles away.

It all happened so fast that — as Scott, Jill and Erin Reid made their way up Franklin Street, with Erin holding the dog in her lap, rubbing his nose and giving him little kisses — they passed the ambulance as it headed in the opposite direction toward the accident scene.

Upon arriving at Triangle Veterinary, there was a little bit of business to quickly sort out, since the Reids weren’t the dog’s owner and they didn’t know who the dog’s owner was. But the bottom line is that there might have been some red tape involved unless Scott and Jill agreed to assume financial responsibility for the dog, so Scott and Jill did so, without hesitation.

And they did it for Kabuki.

“The irony,” Jill says, “is our dog Kabuki had died the weekend before. We were up in Blowing Rock, and my daughter called us at 3 in the morning. We were on the phone with her while she was on the way to the emergency vet, and Kabuki died in the car, which was really traumatic for Erin.

“But so last Sunday night, we just totally flew into action and knew where to go and knew what to do. ... We did it in remembrance of Kabuki. Yeah, so it was perfect that we were the ones to get ahold of Jasper — ’cause apparently, he was really close to dying.”

How close?

Very.

‘They saved his life’

On the outside, Triangle Veterinary emergency doctor Bethany Cashman says, Jasper looked almost completely fine when she first saw him that Sunday night, save for a few little scrapes. Internally, however, he was barely hanging on.

Basically, Cashman says, either when he was hit by the car or when he was slamming against the asphalt, “there was some initial injury, which essentially kind of popped the lung.” She says this caused air to leak out of his lung and into his chest cavity.

“He wasn’t able to fully breathe,” she says. “He wasn’t able to expand his lungs. He couldn’t get his oxygen where it needed to go. And the amount of effort that it was taking him to pull his lungs out enough to try to get enough oxygen, it’s extremely tiring. He would not have been able to keep up with that or his oxygen demand for very much longer.

“So the fact that they were able to get him to the hospital so quickly, and that we were able to just treat him right away, that made a huge difference for him. Any longer and he would have really been in deep trouble, and he absolutely would have died if we hadn’t treated.”

“They saved his life,” Cashman says of the Reids’ efforts. “There is no question.”

Before long, Jim Larson was able to connect with the animal hospital and talk directly to Cashman.

According to the GoFundMe page set up the next day by Jim’s daughter Olivia — Sinclair’s older sister — “Jim told the vet to do whatever it takes to save Jasper and he meant it — I can’t imagine Sinclair without Jasper at her side.”

Neither could Sinclair.

Though it’s among the many things she doesn’t remember from that night, she’s been told that she freaked out when she overheard her mom talking with a nurse about Jasper.

“My mom said that I reached up and grabbed the nurse and was like, ‘Tell me he’s OK! He’s my best friend!’” Sinclair says. “That’s the first thing I said in the hospital room in front of my parents. So, yeah, I was definitely more worried about him than probably myself.”

As she lay in her hospital bed with multiple fractures on her face and skull, multiple lacerations requiring stitches, a broken rib, a subdural hematoma, bleeding around her brain, a massive concussion and road rash all over her body, perhaps what most needed mending was her heart.

And then, quite unexpectedly, the swim community helped it to begin to heal.

A big wave of support

Cindy Eward, a surgeon at Triangle Veterinary, had seen Jasper in the hospital and heard the story of what happened from co-workers, but it didn’t all click together for her until Monday afternoon.

“I was just going through the North Carolina swimming website, because my kids are swimmers as well,” says Eward, whose two teenagers swim for the TAC Titans swim club in Cary, “and I happened to see on there a GoFundMe that they were promoting for this dog and his owner who were hit by a car. I saw the dog’s name and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, that is the dog at our hospital right now.’”

She also immediately recognized the name Sinclair Larson, because Sinclair had competed in many of the meets her oldest had been at before she headed off to college — and had stood out to them because of her talents.

So Eward sent an email to Triangle Veterinary’s hospital administrator, Christy Brown, to say she knew Jasper’s owner through her kids, that she’d learned through the GoFundMe that Jasper’s owner was going through as tough a time as Jasper, and that she was wondering whether there was anything the hospital could do to help.

“And she immediately wrote back and told me that they were going to pretty much make the bill go away,” Eward says. “I mean, she didn’t hesitate. I think as soon as she read it she responded to me. So my part in it was very peripheral. I just saw her name and I recognized her and recognized the dog, and contacted Christy.”

News spread through the swimming and the University of Tennessee communities quickly, with at least one Knoxville TV station and high-profile national swimming websites like SwimSwam and Swimming World Magazine sharing the story along with links to the GoFundMe.

Jim says among those who have reached out to show support include Kathleen Baker, a two-time Olympic medalist from Winston-Salem who now swims for UC Berkeley; Duke star Alyssa Marsh, the daughter of David Marsh, who is head coach of the Team Elite program in San Diego (formerly of Charlotte); and Matt Kredich, director of swimming and diving at Tennessee.

Among the top donors to the GoFundMe for Sinclair and Jasper was the Goldfish Swim Club of Chapel Hill, which kicked in $250. As of Wednesday morning, the amount raised for their medical care stands at $33,804.

It’ll be used for Sinclair’s medical expenses, since Jasper has been taken care of. Last Wednesday, when he was discharged — and when Sinclair wept upon being reunited with him for the first time since the accident — Triangle Veterinary refunded the $1,124 deposit that Jim Larson put down when he called in on the night of the accident.

The remaining balance of $4,677 was forgiven by the hospital.

‘Just touches my heart’

Jim says that when he thinks about the overwhelming amount of love and support they’ve received, the kindness of strangers who have relieved their financial burden, and the above-and-beyond actions of the Reids, it makes him cry.

“Just touches my heart,” he says, softly. “It’s amazing.”

“Yeah, it’s just amazing,” his daughter adds, “that people are that kind. That there are people out there like that. Especially now, when everything in the world just seems kind of awful and everyone just seems mad and angry. To know that there’s still people that are so kind and willing to do what they’ve done for us is just really amazing.”

This time a year ago, she felt like she was being swallowed by darkness.

Treatment and an Australian Shepherd helped her find her way out of it.

And today — thanks in no small part to the humans who helped keep her beloved dog alive — Sinclair Larson feels surrounded by light.