When rain clouds started moving in just before dusk on Jul. 4, 2020, Zhon Wood remembers hurrying to set up the large, mortar-style fireworks he had purchased that morning, and that’s the last thing he remembers. Wood was celebrating the Independence Day holiday with friends and family at his home in Panama City, FL, when […]

WARNING: Contains graphic images of electrical burn injury. Fifty-year-old Mary Calhoun suffered a severe electric shock at her home in Polk County, TN, when a DIY craft went horribly wrong. Inspired by social media, image-sharing sites and online tutorials, Calhoun decided she wanted to try a trend made popular through the internet: wood fracking, also […]

Charles Potter has to be careful. The scar tissue that wraps his lower legs, his anterior trunk from the waist up and half his back, isn’t as pliable as uninjured skin. It doesn’t heal as easily. A simple scratch can become a tear that can progress into an infected, chronic wound. It’s a battle the […]

Shawnahan King was at a friend’s house in Homestead, FL, in 2018 when he noticed the fire was beginning to die in the outdoor firepit. Surrounded by friends and family, including his eight-year-old son, King went to re-ignite the fire when his body burst into flames. “Like a thousand other times in my life, I […]

Wayne (Barry) Johnston had been a lineman for 20 years when on June 27, 2006, he was electrocuted while working a job in Mississippi. “All I know is that somehow when I was working on a line that the power surged,” Johnston said. “The [electrical] line was supposed to be dead, the way I was […]

At just three years old, Malik (MJ) Bryant suffered burns on more than 54% of his body when a grease fire ignited in his home on July 18, 2019. What was a routine day for parents Elijah Turner and Precious Christian proved calamitous when cooking grease—settled in the eye of the stove—immediately ignited after it […]

In the early morning hours of March 8, 2021, Guerda Fontaine was prepping lunch boxes for her two children when turning on the propane tank engulfed her in flames. “Upon the propane exploding, the house itself exploded, the windows exploded, everything just exploded,” said Mrs. Fontaine. “I just heard the explosion and didn’t really understand […]

Megan Hawthorne and her boyfriend, Braydon Nunnery, were pulling a kneeboard behind a jet ski on a river in Florida on Aug. 9, 2020, when the rope got stuck in the propeller. The couple shut off the engine and managed to swim the stalled jet ski to the nearest sandbar before flagging down a friend […]

Eighteen-month-old Kyrie Gilchrist wailed on the floor. His body was covered in hot grease. “My husband and I both ran over to where the stove is, and that’s when we noticed that he had pulled the frying pan down on himself,” said Kyrie’s mom, Natalie Gilchrist. Originally from Virginia, the Gilchrists’ were visiting family in […]

On January 25, 2020, Karen Worthy, Ph.D., MPH, RN, CNE, thought she had the flu. Fever, cough, and muscle aches were all symptoms she experienced when she had the flu the previous year, except this time was very different. As the day progressed, she began presenting other worrying symptoms that indicated not only a possible […]

Kidnapped and set on fire, Stacy Frank was left to die. “I had second and third degree burns on 40 percent of my body. Both my arms, my chest, and up to the very bottom of my cheek from the bottom of my lip down are burned,” said Stacy. “The doctors gave me only a 20 […]

“I guess, when you’re going through something that horrific, you aren’t thinking clearly, because I just wanted to run through and make sure everyone was out. I thought I was Super Woman, going to save everything and everybody,” said Patricia. Oct. 24, 2013 was a routine morning for Patricia Perkins. The 44-year-old beautician from Little […]