Longmont resident Anthony Zhang resolves to keep moving forward from deadly double motorcycle crash

May 22—The first thing Anthony Zhang remembers after the crash is lying on a stretcher wondering why his boots were so tight.

He was looking up at the face of his girlfriend, Gabriela Hernandez, 22, and holding her hand as she sat beside him in the emergency department of UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies.

"My legs feel tight. So swollen," Zhang says. "I asked her, 'Take my boots off. Take my boots off.'"

But Zhang wasn't wearing boots. By the time he was taken to the hospital in Loveland, his boots had been removed.

Legs ballooning from the impact, Zhang, 23, was feeling the sensation of his nerves in agony as his brain tried to reconcile with the abrupt loss of signal below his navel. The pain was the result of a life-altering double motorcycle crash on Nov. 7. The other rider involved, Jeffery Broomfield, 66, who the Colorado State Patrol says failed to navigate the curve of the road, died at the scene.

Roughly six months later on May 13, Zhang steered his wheelchair out the front door of his ground-level apartment in Longmont to meet Hernandez, as she arrived home from work. Zhang is a former Boulder resident, who now lives in Longmont.

On this average Friday, the couple sat inside, Zhang in his wheelchair and Hernandez on the couch. Zhang talked about how his legs still feel that same tingling sensation. He takes medication three times a day to help relieve the nerve pain.

Recovery has been anything but easy. But Zhang has resolved to keep moving up, even on days when his body screams at him to do less.

"Everyone has a bump in the road or several bumps in the road. It's not reasonable for anyone to say, 'My bump is worse than your bump. Your bump is not as bad as mine.' It doesn't matter," Zhang said. "Everyone has to deal with a bump, and it's how you deal with the bump yourself that defines the rest of your life."

The crash

Zhang had ridden Buckhorn Road, near Horsetooth Reservoir west of Fort Collins, on his motorcycle more than 10 times.

That's why as he steered his white Ducati sportbike down the road just before noon on that sunny November day, he knew about the upcoming cattle guards that were about 2 miles ahead. Riding motorcycles in front of him were Hernandez and their friend Jordan Sarco, who was 20 at the time. As Zhang talked with Hernandez via Bluetooth, he was warning her about the grated road obstacle and giving her advice on how to approach it.

"That's the last thing I remember," Zhang said. "I was telling her, explaining what the cattle guards are."

Hernandez remembers rounding the curve of the road and how the line suddenly went dead with a crack.

"I slowed down, and was like 'Babe? Babe?'" Hernandez said. "I thought it just cut out. I was looking in my rearview mirror and he wasn't coming behind us."

Just a moment before, Sarco had seen Broomfield. He remembers giving him a friendly wave, which was reciprocated. When Zhang didn't appear after a moment, Hernandez and Sarco pulled over, sensing that something was wrong.

"That's when my heart sank," Sarco said. "We looked at each other and knew we needed to turn around."

Flipping back in the other direction, Sarco and Hernandez found Zhang lying on the roadway. One of Zhang's legs was slung over his toppled motorcycle, his eyes barely open. Hernandez frantically parked her bike, but because the road was on an incline, it fell on top of her. She was so full of adrenaline that she pushed it off without a thought to get to Zhang.

Six months later, talking about that moment when she was kneeling on the road at Zhang's side makes her voice fill with emotion.

"His eyes were barely open, and they were bloodshot red, I remember," Hernandez said. "He was mumbling something. I thought he was going to die in that moment."

Sarco immediately tried calling 911, but couldn't get a cellphone signal. He was about to drive down the road to try to find reception when another driver passing by stopped and was able to get through to dispatchers.

A motorist, who was a retired military medic, also saw the aftermath of the crash. She instructed Sarco and Hernandez to stay calm and keep Zhang, who was fading in and out of consciousness, alert.

"He didn't realize what was happening, he didn't know who he was," Hernandez said. "He was kind of agitated. He wanted to take his helmet off. I know from all the videos that I watched about riding that you don't take your helmet off. You don't move; you just stay there."

When Hernandez first saw Zhang lying in the roadway, she said she initially thought that he had slid on some loose gravel and crashed. It wasn't until an ambulance was speeding in their direction that Hernandez and Sarco said one of the passersby who had stopped to help suddenly shouted, "Hey, who is this? Is he with you guys?"

Just off the roadway, Broomfield was also lying there injured. His motorcycle had flown even farther and tumbled down an embankment, coming to a stop in the thick brush.

According to a Colorado State Patrol crash report, Broomfield had been traveling westbound on Buckhorn Road, near milepost 13. The report said the operator of vehicle 1, identified as Broomfield, "failed to negotiate a right curve." Broomfield's vehicle exited the left side of the northbound lane and continued to travel in a northwestern direction, entering the path of travel of the operator of vehicle 2, identified as Zhang.

The report says Broomfield's vehicle struck the right-front side of Zhang's vehicle, causing them both to be ejected. While Broomfield's bike left the roadway, Zhang's vehicle fell on its left side, pinning him beneath it, the report describes.

Hernandez recalls seeing what she thought was a scrap of cloth in the bushes near the road. Her attention, though, was zeroed in on her boyfriend. When the passerby asked them about Broomfield, Hernandez and Sarco realized there was more to the crash.

When the ambulance arrived, Hernandez said, paramedics worked on Broomfield first, since his condition was so critical. She recalled how when there was nothing more they could do, they covered Broomfield's body and shifted their attention to Zhang.

A relationship with riding

It was Zhang's motorcycles that caught Hernandez's eye.

The two both worked at Medtronic and started out as friends. Zhang, whose love language is food, made sure he brought Hernandez lunch every day. He gave her a ride on his motorcycle, a black Kawasaki Ninja 400, and remembers how she clung to him with each curve of the road.

Fellow coworker Eric Enstrom encouraged Zhang to get into riding. By February 2018, Zhang had bought his second bike: a Ducati motorcycle.

Enstrom himself was in a life-altering crash, just before Zhang. On July 20, 2021, Enstrom lost a foot when he was reportedly struck by vehicle while crossing through a Longmont intersection at South Hover Street and Ken Pratt Boulevard.

For Hernandez and Zhang, who started dating in 2020, motorcycle riding was something they did two to three times a week. Hernandez began learning how to ride about a year after they got together. She bought her own bike in February 2021 and received her motorcycle endorsement, which involves passing a written skills test. Zhang also had his motorcycle endorsement. After a trip to Estes Park, they dreamed of exploring new roads that would take them deeper into the mountains.

On the day of the crash, Zhang was excited to show Hernandez and Sarco the Rist Canyon area. The area involves a network of roads that loop around Horsetooth Reservoir. It was among Zhang's favorite places to ride.

As the more-experienced rider of five years, Zhang wanted to make sure he offered them all the help he could give in navigating the area, which was why they were talking via Bluetooth that day. Sarco had been on the call earlier in the ride, but lost connection before the crash.

"He's the safest person I know," Hernandez said of Zhang's riding style.

37 years of marriage

When her husband, Jeffery Broomfield, went riding, he was usually home by 3 p.m.

So when Kristen Broomfield said it was late afternoon on Nov. 7 and he still wasn't home, she started to get worried. She had been texting and calling him, but he wasn't answering.

About 6 p.m., two deputies and a chaplain came to the door of the Broomfields' Loveland home. They broke the news to her.

Kristen said her husband died doing what he loved. She said he had been riding motorcycles for about 50 years. However, the bike he was riding was brand-new. He had bought it less than 24 hours before the crash.

Kristen and Jeffery had been married for 37 years. She remembers meeting him through a mutual friend and the way his blue eyes seemed to be "twinkling." He had retired in 2020 after seven years of running his own handyman business and a career in facilities maintenance before that.

Jeffery was a caring person who loved animals. The couple's 17-year-old tuxedo cat, Billy, died in April.

If there's anything people should know about her husband after the crash, Kristen said she hopes people understand that it was an accident.

"If he had lived, he would be gone now, because he wouldn't be able to live with the fact that he had hurt Anthony," Kristen said. "I know him. He would have been devastated, like I was devastated."

The road to recovery

The injuries Zhang had when he was admitted to UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies on the day of the crash were numerous. One of his lungs collapsed, and the second was on the verge of collapsing. He broke two ribs, his right-side clavicle snapped in half, and there was a burst fracture in his spine.

The day after the crash, a doctor told Zhang that the damage to his spine meant he would likely never walk again. Zhang said he wasn't surprised by the news. When he realized that the pressure he felt on his legs shortly after the crash was not from wearing boots, he knew something was seriously wrong.

In the days following the crash, Zhang wasn't capable of doing much. He couldn't hold his cellphone in his hands, turn his body or eat by himself. His father, who like Hernandez, was by Zhang's side at the hospital, had to sign documents for him.

Zhang endured three surgeries that first week. Two incisions, called a fasciotomy, were made in his left leg to relieve the pressure of mass swelling that was threatening to kill his muscle tissue. The other two surgeries involved fixing his clavicle and installing rods and bolts in his spine, while clearing out bone fragments.

As Zhang was processing what his road to recovery would be like, he thought about the gears of a motorcycle and how "one" is the lowest gear a rider can be in.

"After you're down at the bottom at one, the only place to go is up," Zhang said. "If you start going down more, it's not easy to get out of that pit."

Eight days after his crash, Zhang willed himself to stop taking the painkillers that had provided so much relief and also so much constipation. With his birthday coming up, he wanted to be able to eat a meal Hernandez was bringing him from one of his favorite restaurants, Aoi Sushi & Izakaya in Boulder. He couldn't do that with his stomach in knots, so when medical staff brought him a painkiller in the morning, he told them to take it away.

His tenacity paid off. On his 23rd birthday, Zhang ate pretty well.

Staying in that mindset wasn't always easy though. The physical and mental challenges he took on could fill a book.

The first time he transitioned from his hospital bed to a standup wheelchair, roughly two weeks after the crash, he began sweating profusely and nearly passed out from the effort. It was the most activity he had managed since before the crash.

As he built up his physical strength, Zhang faced other obstacles.

In those early days after he was finally able to come home, Zhang felt depressed. He was navigating a new life in which he had no control of his body below his belly button. Suddenly, the ample hospital resources to help him with incontinence, equipment for physical therapy and some of the medications he had been taking were no longer there.

"Even those small things were really huge when I came back home, after spending a month in trauma care and two months in acute rehab," Zhang said. "All of a sudden, I'm back in real life. That hit hard."

Despite the new challenges he now faced, Zhang kept changing gears.

"He is a very strong-minded person," Hernandez said. "That's what I have always loved about him. He stayed strong and worked his hardest."

Every Tuesday, Zhang goes to physical therapy to continue to advance his strength. He has his mind set on being able to effortlessly pop his body out of his wheelchair. To transition from his wheelchair now, he uses a board that he slides his body across.

While his major focus has been his recovery, Zhang is also taking courses in IT, with hopes of landing a job in the industry down the line.

Sarco has talked with Zhang a few times since the crash. He noticed that his friend's sense of humor hasn't faded.

When Sarco thinks back to the crash that day, it's a vivid and unpleasant memory. But, he doesn't want the story to fade.

Sarco wants people to know what happened. As the weather warms and more motorcyclists return to the road, Sarco hopes people know what can happen. He wants vehicle and motorcycle operators alike to eliminate distractions so that they can put their full focus into protecting those around them.

"People don't pay attention enough, and it feels like people don't respect the lives that are underneath those helmets," Sarco said.

To help:

A GoFundMe was set up for Zhang at gofundme.com/f/anthony-zhang-motorcycle-accident-fundraiser.