- April 26, 2024
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The day after a crash claimed the left legs of Destiny McCarrick and Mike Stevens, Joey McCarrick got a call back from ‘The Voice.’
With Destiny McCarrick holding on in back, her boyfriend Mike “Slim” Stevens steered through a scenic road carved into boulders in rural South Dakota. It was the Palm Coast couple’s first major motorcycle event, so they did it big, attending the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally — one of the largest rallies in the United States.
Stevens revved his engine toward a blind turn at a mountain’s corner. Things turned bad when a Harley-Davidson sped around the bend, going 75 in a 35 mph zone. He was in Stevens’ lane, trying to weave past traffic.
He was coming right for them.
“Honey, I can’t — ” Stevens said, jerking the handles. The next 30 seconds played out like an hour.
The Harley over-corrected, fell on its side. Stevens tried to move clear.
When the bikes collided, Stevens was hit first. The Harley’s spinning tire tore through his thigh, severing his left leg instantly.
The Harley continued toward McCarrick, where its engine block crushed her left femur before dragging past them, a blur of silver and sparks.
“Everything was freeze-framed,” Stevens said. “Every night, I go over it, and over it and over it.”
The couple lay there, just close enough to touch fingers.
“I got up to assess the situation and saw my leg lying by my head,” Stevens said.
A former marine, Stevens knew the blood pouring from his leg and onto the blacktop, a pool at least 9 feet in diameter, was from a femoral artery.
He was in shock. His shirt was covered in crimson. Soon, he’d be dead.
Destiny yelled at him. We’re going to be OK, she screamed. I love you!
Then, it was quiet.
“At least we’ll die together,” the couple joked, bloody fingers intermingled on the pavement.
Sirens screamed in the distance.
The show must go on
McCarrick’s mother, Kerry, and 16-year-old brother, Joey, were back in Palm Coast — seemingly a million miles away. They kept in touch through phone calls and Facebook posts.
Before ambulances arrived to the crash site, Destiny explained, fellow riders stopped to help. An anonymous marine appeared and tied a tourniquet around Stevens’ leg. Destiny’s mother, co-owner of McCharacters Music Café and Sports Bar, calls him a “miraculous angel.”
“You’re going to be all right,” the marine told Stevens. “I’ve done a thousand of these, and this one’s the easiest, because I’m not being shot at.”
Two paramedics ran to Destiny.
When she and Stevens awoke, they found that their left legs were replaced with gauze-covered stumps — Stevens’ just below the thigh and McCarrick’s above the ankle.
Destiny thought of all the pairs of high heels she’d never wear.
Back in Florida, Joey heard about the accident while he was eating dinner.
He couldn’t believe it. His sister was laid up in some hospital somewhere, in pieces. There was no way he could go to his audition after that.
A few weeks earlier, Destiny and Joey agreed to audition for NBC’s “The Voice,” a singing show similar to “American Idol.” On her way to Sturgis, McCarrick stopped in Atlanta for her audition. She didn’t make the cut.
Joey was scheduled to try out later, in Orlando.
“I don’t know if I have it in me to do this,” he told Destiny, over the phone. “I don’t know if I have it in my heart.”
Destiny knew he was being ridiculous.
“This is your dream,” she told him. “This is my dream. Make it big for me, bud … You’re doing it for us.”
Pity is for punks
“Every day, I find something that I cannot do,” Mike Stevens said, with a shrug.
It takes 30 minutes to get up for a drink. An hour-and-a-half to get ready in the morning. All of a sudden, going to the bathroom is a project.
But Stevens, all tattoos and Boston twang, has never been a rule-follower, and so he skipped right over the first five stages of grief and onto the sixth: reconstruction and working through. That step seemed more productive.
“I’m not normal,” he said, nudging the side of his “granny walker,” making fun of the basket hanging in front, filled with tote bags and outfitted with a new, black cup holder.
After 14 days in the hospital and rehab clinic, where staff called the two “rock stars” because of their die-hard positivity, Stevens returned to work his first week back in Flagler.
Friends and family contributed money to help with his and Destiny’s medical bills. His business partners, Eric Xavier and Jim Cristos, took out loans and gave up the titles to their cars to help pay for the $21,000 medical transport home.
“It’s something that very rarely we see in life, that somebody rises above the occasion,” Stevens said.
Stevens and McCarrick agreed to open a foundation with some of the funds they received for treatment.
“There is not enough time to cry about it,” Stevens said, adding that being an amputee gives him “validity.” Now, he can help people, he said. People listen to you when you’re missing a leg.
Pity is for punks.
The duet
Joey McCarrick’s legs were trembling. He was “freaking out.”
Of 10,000 contestants, he was in a group of 10, about to sing a cappella to a stranger. The whole day, he
hadn’t seen one red ticket, which meant no one had been accepted to the audition’s second round.
Just yesterday, his sister, the best singer he knows, got part of her leg chopped off. And here he was auditioning for a TV show.
On his turn, he got up. He whispered to himself: Destiny is here with me.
“We were so emotional all day, and I was just crying all day,” said Kerry McCarrick, who was sitting in the back, waiting for her son to start. “When (he got up), something happened in that room … something spiritual.”
Joey said the audition felt like a duet — he and Destiny, singing together like they always had since he was 5 years old.
“I felt her there with me,” he said, through the highs and lows of the melody. “When I closed my eyes, I could see her.”
When he finished, the room was silent.
Later, red ticket in hand, he called his sister, for what he described as “the best conversation that I’ve ever had with anybody.”
Only 1% of all Orlando contestants, or about 80 other singers, got red tickets. Out of eight cities nationwide, the show will accept about 160 people.
The next audition was filmed in front of the show’s producer. Each singer was to perform three songs. The judges stopped Joey at two.
He got a second red ticket, making Orlando’s Top 25. Joey’s success couldn’t have come at a better time for the family.
“Apparently, we were chosen to do something,” Stevens said, watching Destiny rub her leg, then eyeing his walker. The two believe they’ll spearhead a national foundation for amputees, work with prosthetic research institutes, the Wounded Warrior Project, the Special Olympics. Joey believes he’s meant to give their foundation exposure.
His goal is to sing with his sister, just once, on TV.
“I think that God has a plan, and it’s all set out for us,” he said. “I think that Mike and Des are supposed to do something really great with their lives.”
Joey’s next audition, a semifinal in Los Angeles, is set for the end of the month.
Next year, Destiny and Stevens will return to Sturgis.
BENEFIT EVENT
A benefit event for amputees Mike Stevens and Destiny McCarrick will be held at McCharacters Music Café and Sports Bar, owned by Destiny’s parents Marty and Kerry McCarrick, in November. To donate, call 597-2971 or visit www.Facebook.com/McCarrickStevensFoundation.
LISTEN: To hear Joey McCarrick’s music, visit www.Reverb-Nation.com/JoeyMcCarrick.
