Mom Gets Surprising Text From Late Son's Phone
After Carole Adler’s 21-year-old son died while training to become a Colorado State Trooper, she continued to text the cadet’s phone, saying she loved and missed him, trying to mend her broken heart.
One day, she got a text back.
Kell Husley, a police sergeant in Greeley, Colorado, received a new phone number and was getting the messages Adler was sending to her boy, Taylor Thyfault.
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“So I sent a text back and identified myself, and said ‘I’m with the Greeley Police Department, and I don’t think your texts are going where you think they are,’” Husley told the KUSA television station in Denver.
That text began a relationship between the grieving mother and police sergeant who was doing the job that Thyfault was determined to do.
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Thyfault had many goals for his life. His high school do-list included some teenage pipe dreams – wrestle an alligator, swim with sharks, go cliff diving – and some goals he was able to accomplish – graduate high school, join the army, be the best son possible.
Then, in May, Thyfault was struck and killed by a driver-on-the-run during a police chase near Longmont, Colorado. The driver accused of killing the cadet has been charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder – another police officer was critically injured — according to Longmont Times-Call.
“Every day, it hits me like a ton of bricks, when I can’t text him,” Adler told the TV station. “We’re just that close. Everything that happened in his life was in my life.”
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Adler, who texted her son often when he was alive, continued to text him after his death, spilling out her loss and anguish. An Aug. 4 text said, “The urge to text you talk to you is strong tonight. I miss you. So much. I just want to see you feel you and hear you. I don’t want you gone from me.” [sic.]
At first, Husley, a 33-year veteran officer, ignored the texts that were coming over his new phone, which had been assigned Thyfault’s old number. Then, after a particularly wrenching message, he texted the cadet’s mother and offered to change the number.
Adler, however, likes the connection, the kismet of her boy’s cell phone number resting with a police officer. And Husley likes hearing about Thyfault’s passion, which reminds him of his cadet days.
“It’s good for me to remember all the wonderful things he was looking forward to,” Husley says. “It’s like I always have a little angel in my pocket now.”
Taylor Thyfault was posthumously promoted to a Colorado State Patrol Trooper, according to a memorial Facebook page.
Yahoo Parenting was unable to reach Adler or Husley for comment.
(Photos: Carole Adler)
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