http://www.lacrossetribune.com/articles/2003/10/12/news/00lead.txt
Published - Sunday, October 12, 2003
Anatomy of a tragedy: Doctor's death shakes community
By Matt James / La Crosse Tribune
For a couple seconds, Ralph Heath wondered whether he would make it home alive.
On the dreary, drizzly morning of Sept. 26, Heath rode down Losey Boulevard on his way to the First Congregational Church. At 5 a.m. that morning, like most Tuesday and Friday mornings, Heath was supposed to meet a group of people that call themselves the Early Morning Aerobic Group, hardcore bike enthusiasts.
The "Congo," as they have nicknamed the church at the corner of Main and Losey, is the starting point for many road races in the area. But that morning, Heath — a rider who may be 52 years old and a business owner, but who grinds out nearly 5,000 miles per year and can cruise at 20 to 25 mph — almost didn't make it.
On the way, he saw a car ready to pull out of Kwik Trip. His legs pumped and the car drew nearer and he remembers shining his headlight directly at the driver. The driver saw him, but in the dark, misjudged the distance and pulled out anyway. Heath yanked on the brakes and skidded sideways. Somehow, he kept the bike upright.
Sure, it was a close one, but a near fender-bender is a little different when the other vehicle weighs 3,000 pounds and yours weighs 200, most of which is you.
"It's like a near-death experience," he would say.
It started to sprinkle and not many in the E.M.A.G. showed up at the Congo that morning, so Heath and a friend decided to bike up Grandad Bluff, where the friend lived. After he made his way around to Hwy. 33, and turned to go down Irish Hill, Heath saw what many in the La Crosse biking community had feared for years, what he had narrowly avoided less than an hour before, and what would ultimately rob a city of one of its most prized medical recruits.
He saw Scott Sprtel, a thin, 28-year-old resident in his third year at Gundersen Lutheran Medical Center, lying dead in the road. He saw a 68-year-old La Crosse woman, Laura Erickson, in such shock that two witnesses had to help her walk.
She was unhurt.
"It was the most horrific scene I've ever seen," he said. "There was blood everywhere, and I wondered why they weren't covering him up."
Frank Sprtel had his two oldest sons, Scott and Frank Jr., running back in grade school, not with visions of their greatness, but of getting himself in a little better shape while spending time with his boys. By the time they reached junior high, he could barely keep up.
Even then, something happened to Scott Sprtel when he ran. He morphed into a different person, not the Clark Kent persona many saw.
When his feet hit that pavement, he wasn't patient or reserved. He wasn't the nurturing doctor who was leaving the hospital at 5 p.m. on a Friday two weeks before his death when someone needed an intern to perform a procedure.
Sprtel volunteered and was soon plunging a needle into the back of a 96-year-old man and draining a liter of fluid from his chest. He didn't hurry through it to get on with his weekend. Sprtel wanted to know the man's name, wanted to explain the options himself, made sure to comfort him through the scary procedure.
It turned out the man had cancer.
"No words can ever do justice to what a talented and caring kid he was," said Dr. Michael Dolan, the chairman of the department of internal medicine at Gundersen, a 43-year-old man who lives a block and a half from Hwy. 33 and heard the sirens that dreadful morning.
"We were already putting pressure on (Sprtel) to stay. We'd already gotten him to agree to be (chief resident) and figured we'd have another 12 months to convince him to stay for good."
No, Sprtel didn't run like that at all. He ran like a possessed machine, with those glasses off and his head high. He didn't run to pass the time, or to comfort others, or to stay in shape. He ran because he was great at it, and he wanted to get better. It was his chance to escape from the weight of sick patients, and 80-hour weeks, and piles of paperwork and medical books.
"Being a resident is so stressful," says his mother, Mary, a nurse in Milwaukee. "They need to do something. His whole life was dedicated to helping people. This was time for himself."
It was also his time to excel. His senior year, Sprtel came to La Crosse and placed seventh in the mile for Whitefish Bay High School at the state track meet. He went on to run indoor and outdoor track and cross country at Lawrence University.
He'd already run a handful of marathons and qualified for the Boston Marathon by finishing 15th in the Green Bay Marathon with a time of 2:38.05. He and Frank Jr., his brother and best friend, an attorney for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington D.C., had planned to run Boston in the spring.
Frank Jr. is running the Chicago Marathon today. His knee hurts and his heart aches and he's never felt so alone, but he's running no matter what. "I don't care what place I get," he told his father, tears gushing down both their faces. "I just have to finish."
It was a knee injury that pushed Sprtel to start riding his mountain bike in the first place. In June, he fell while whitewater rafting, banged his knee and it hadn't felt right since. Some would have rested. He exchanged 10-mile runs at 5 a.m. for even earlier bike rides of twice that distance. It would keep him in shape for Boston.
He was on one of those rides that Friday morning, churning east up Irish Hill, one foot inside the white line, police would say, when Erickson struck him from behind in a beat-up ‘93 Pontiac, spilling Sprtel over the top. It was dark. She never saw him; never slowed until well after impact.
The impact on those who knew Sprtel was as powerful. Patients wanted to know why the entire hospital was so gloomy. Many from La Crosse went to the funeral last week in Whitefish Bay, where his parents still live, but so many still grieved, the hospital is holding a ceremony at 1 p.m. on Tuesday at the Overholt and Rasmus auditoriums.
"It hit this institution so hard," says Dr. Steven Pearson, the head of the internal medicine residency program. "because he had so much going for him."
Touched in a different way was the bike community, which Sprtel wasn't a part of. La Crosse has long been known as a paradise for bike enthusiasts, both amateur and professional, because of its beauty and rocky terrain. Greg LeMond trained and met his wife here as a junior, then went on to become the first American to win the Tour de France.
Hundreds of local riders are in groups such as the La Crosse Velo Club. Many say area roads — like Irish Hill where there is only a shoulder for westbound traffic, the opposite direction Sprtel was going — are ill-equipped for bike riders, and that area automobile drivers, do not respect them. Most have stories like Scott Dunne, the co-owner of Bikes Limited store, who said a driver recently chucked a glass bottle at him.
"There's a lot of people who don't want us on the road," Dunne says.
The controversy has been fueled by Sprtel's death, and many are waiting to see if charges are brought against Erickson. Sprtel was wearing a reflector on his back that made him a legal rider, but did not have a battery-powered light that riders often wear in the mornings and evenings.
La Crosse deputies met with the district attorney's office Friday and went to the scene, but decided it best to reconstruct the wreck next week with the State Patrol before making a decision.
Complicating the issue is the fact that Erickson's license was suspended at the time of the wreck, and if the 68-year-old woman is indeed ticketed for that, it would be the sixth time she has been cited for suspended license or registration in the last two years.
Erickson submitted to an alcohol test, but according to La Crosse County District Attorney Scott Horne, it showed no signs of drinking.
Horne said he did not know the reason for her suspension, but it could influence the decision to press charges, though her Wisconsin driving record only shows she has been stopped for speeding and being left of center.
"If it were failure to pay a fine," Horne said. "It would be a leap to say that it had a barring on this wreck."
To a grieving family across the state, it doesn't matter what she was suspended for. They want a guarantee Erickson will be off the road.
"I would like to see her put away so she doesn't kill someone else," Mary says through tears. "She's going to put some other family through this. It's like a living hell. You have no idea what this has done to the Whitefish Bay community."
It's clear what it has done to a La Crosse community, one without a chief resident at Gundersen for next year, but worse yet, a respected person and doctor who wanted to make this his home.
"He loved La Crosse," Mary says. "We talked about it. I think he was going to stay there forever."
Matt James can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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