"I literally ran myself over with a van."

In this narrative episode of This One Time in Kankakee, we travel out to Hopkins Park, Illinois, to meet military veteran Jake Lee. On Mother’s Day weekend in 1991, a mischievous afternoon inside the family van took a near-fatal turn when the transmission accidentally engaged. What followed is a sequence of events so mathematically improbable it defies belief—involving a torrential downpour, a perfectly placed trench of rain-washed sand, and an emergency surgery that uncovered an entirely different, hidden killer.

From evading packs of dogs on childhood bike rides to strutting like Cab Calloway down hospital hallways, Jake shares a profoundly moving, laugh-out-loud funny story about trauma, community, and the chaotic alignment of miracles.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode:

• The Hopkins Park Sandbox: What it was like growing up as the youngest of five in rural Illinois during the early '90s.
• The Physics of a Miracle: How a torrential rainstorm two days prior created the exact conditions needed to save Jake’s life.
• The Hidden Enemy: The shocking discovery Cook County surgeons made after repairing his torn liver that would have otherwise gone undetected.
• A Legacy of Gratitude: How a childhood accident completely reshaped Jake’s perspective on community, faith, and life.

Want more from the WVLI Podcast Network? Listen to the WVLI News Update with Rob West every weekday morning! Get the days local news from the greater Kankakee County, IL area in 10 minutes or less. 

Subscribe now on your preferred podcast platform: https://wvlinewsupdate.buzzsprout.com

The Voices You Trust, Beyond The Dial.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Support for this one time in Kankiki comes from Ravenspring Media, where method, media, and mindfulness create impact. From video production, photography, animation, and team building, Ravenspring Media creates compelling content that captures your brand's unique story in a strategic way. With over 20 years of visual storytelling experience, Ravenspring Media brings together creative expertise and a fresh perspective to every project they undertake. Begin your story today at ravenspringmedia.com. Support for this one time in Kankakee comes from the Kankiki Area YMCA. The Kankiki Area YMCA is more than just a gym. It's a movement of thousands of people making positive changes in their lives and their community. The YMCA is Kankiki's premier provider of family health and wellness. Become a Y member today at their location on Kennedy Drive in Kankakee or at K3YMCA.org. For youth development, for healthy living, for social responsibility, the Kankakee Area YMCA.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

So this one time in Kankakee, I literally ran myself over with a van.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Oh, this is gonna be good. Welcome to this one time in Kankakee from the W VLI podcast network. I'm Jake Lamour. Today we're taking you out to Hopkins Park, a community filled with deep roots, sprawling acres, and a man named Jacob Lee. Most people just call him Jake. If you've met Jake today, you'd find a warm, quick-witted guy, a guy who served five and a half years in the United States Navy. But if you traveled back to May of 1991, you'd find a four and a half-year-old boy who managed to do something mechanically improbable, terrifying, and altogether miraculous. To understand how it happened, you have to understand the sandbox he was playing in.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Only we we didn't have a business out of the junk. It was just junk, okay? And we had probably a couple and a half acres that um we lived on actively and was fenced in.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

On those two and a half acres, Jake was the youngest of five siblings. It was the kind of childhood defined by an unwritten rule of the era. Get pushed out the front door in the morning, and don't you dare come back inside until the street lights turn on.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

We were put outside and told to go play and not to come back in because you weren't allowed to run in and out of the house. You got in trouble for that kind of thing. Also, if you were riding your bike, uh, which the younger three siblings were very close in age, um, there's only three three and a half years that separate the three of us, and so um we did a lot of things together growing up. We'd ride our bikes. Um in that now in um Hopkins, which is where we grew up at, the blocks were not like the city blocks in Kankakee. They were much larger. And so um, you know, we could I mean it probably was a mile and a half or so to ride around the block, but um that was one of the things we used to do quite frequently. And I remember on the the back road, I believe that was 12,000, um, there were these this group of dogs. You know what you call them, a school, a flock, or something. I don't know. I don't know what you call them. So whatever you call them, there's this gang of dogs that would come and they would chase us. And and so we finally realized when they would start running, and uh, so my brother would say, All right, you two, my sister and I, get in the front and pedal as fast as you can. And so we're just pedaling it with all our and but the dogs are just right there barking and biting and everything else. We never got caught, which is kind of nice.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Um Jake and his siblings were experts at outrunning danger on two wheels. But on Mother's Day weekend, 1991, Danger didn't have four legs, a wagging tail, or sharp teeth. It had four wheels, a steel chassis, and an unlocked transmission. It was mid-May. Jake was just four and a half years old. Around the Lee Yard, there were plenty of decommissioned rusted cars that didn't work. Perfect props for a kid's imagination, right? But sitting on the incline of their sloped driveway was the Family Crown Jewel, a fully operational, full-sized conversion van.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

It was a full-size conversion van with the ladder on the back and the captain seats and the the uh couch that folded into a bed, so like it's a real deal, a family vehicle. And of course, back then, you uh you don't really have the safety features on those vehicles that you have now.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Jake and his older brother, who was about seven at the time, climbed into the cab. They were doing what they always did: pretending to drive to Kankakee, pretending to go to Chicago, clamoring over the captain's chairs, moving the steering wheel, and then a shift.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

We're in the van and we're kind of tussling about or whatever, and the transmission gets engaged. Now the van begins to roll, and my brother freaks out, and he's a little older, he's about three years older than me, so he jumps out of the van. He ran around to the back. Now I didn't know he was doing this. Uh, I found this out later, but he ran around to the back to grab the ladder to pull the van back from rolling.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Picture it. A seven-year-old boy fueled by pure adrenaline trying to play tug-of-war against a multi-ton rolling piece of American steel. It was an impossible battle. Inside the cab, four-year-old Jake realized he was entirely alone, and the world outside the passenger door was moving faster and faster.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Obviously, that didn't go so well. Um, I, on the other hand, somehow got tripped up as I tried to exit the vehicle and I fell out of the van. And so those vans, you know, they had that metal step that was super sharp. Uh, so I hit that as I was tumbling out of the van. And as I'm tumbling down the hill, the uh the van is rolling behind me.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

When a vehicle that size rolls over a human body, physics usually dictates a tragic end. If Jake had fallen onto the solid gravel portion of the driveway, his skull would have collapsed. But two days prior, the skies above Hopkins Park had opened up.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

What's fascinating about all of this is a couple of days before this incident uh happened, we got torrential downpours. I mean, it poured, and we lived on a hill, and so the rain washed these little trenches, they washed the sand away from the side of the gravel. And there there were these little trenches in the driveway. And so as I'm tumbling down the hill, my head kind of gets tucked in one of those trenches of sand. And then the van just kind of rolls over my head and swells it like an accordion. But it didn't crush it, you know, it just kind of pushed it in the ground because it's so heavy.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

It squashed his head like an accordion. The soft rain-soaked sand absorbed the weight, acting like a protective mold around his skull. The tire rolled completely over him and then veered off into the grass. Jake was alive, but his nervous system was in a state of absolute shock.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

I remember as uh as I got up from this episode, I compare it to if you ever hit your funny bone, the pain was like taking that sensation of numbness and that weirdness with your funny bone, and just multiplying it by about a thousand. And you'll get to like my pain level, and I felt numbness all over my body. I kept falling down and screaming, Dad, I'm sorry, Dad, I'm sorry, don't I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Jake's dad ran out, scooped up his broken boy, and rushed him inside, then back out to the van, driving down the road at breakneck speeds to intercept an ambulance. In the chaos of the ER, doctors sheared away Jake's favorite Cubs jacket with medical scissors. And as word leaked out into the tight-knit community of Hopkins Park, a dark rumor began to outrun the truth.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

There were actually rumors around town that my dad had run me over. So we had to live with those rumors for a while. But it it was it was completely me, completely my fault.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Jake was admitted to Riverside Hospital with a bruised brain and a lacerated liver. But back in 1991, Riverside didn't have a dedicated pediatric unit. The medical staff did the best they could, but an error in judgment nearly cost Jake his life. They prescribed him bed rest, but they also encouraged him to walk.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

The recommendations they were making after my first surgery were the worst thing they could have done to me. They had me walking, and the walking spread the jaundice because of the lacerated liver, and so I began to swell. The iris of my eyes turned yellow, the soles of my feet, the palms of my hands. My mom would describe me as looking like I'm eight months pregnant, uh, as his four-year-old kid waddling around, and they can't figure out why I'm getting worse.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Jake was dying. His liver was failing, toxifying his tiny body. Realizing they were unequipped for this crisis, Riverside ordered an emergency transfer to Cook County Hospital in Chicago. But time was a luxury they didn't have. Jake's parents couldn't even make the trip up to the city in time because their vehicle couldn't handle the highway speed. So a doctor at Cook County did something desperate. He picked up a telephone.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

The doctor actually, and it was probably illegal, but got their consent to operate on me over the phone because they said if they did not operate immediately, chances are I wouldn't survive the night. Because I had gotten that bad.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

They wheeled the four-year-old into the operating room, sliced open his abdomen, and began working to repair his torn liver. But as the surgeons moved deeper into his cavity, they stopped. They found something else. Something completely unrelated to the tire tracks on Jake's face.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

What they found was I also had a birth defect. I had the twisting of the intestines that normally shows up when you're about two years of age because you'll have issues with bowel movements and things like that. I never had any of those problems. And so it was the undetectable version that probably wouldn't show up until I was an adolescent. And that then it would have been too late because everything would have rotted. So you could arguably say that this crazy, bizarre event, horrific event, if you want to add how my mom probably felt in all of this, uh, was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Think about the mathematics of that moment. If Jake didn't play in the van, if the van didn't roll down the hill, if his liver did not get lacerated, he never would have ended up on the operating table at Cook County Hospital on that specific night. The invisible clock inside his abdomen would have kept ticking completely unnoticed until it was too late. A four-ton van had crushed him. Just enough to save his life. There was his grandfather who made the trip from the south side of Chicago every single day.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

One of my fondest memories of him is when I got well enough to walk, uh, he would take me on walks, but he'd have me uh he'd have me strut like Cab Callaway did uh when he sang mini the moocher. And so can you imagine this? This four-year-old kid, and I'm sitting there strutting with my finger down and all of that. And my mother saw that. She's like, what is wrong with my father-in-law teaching my child the mini-the-moocher walk?

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Then there was this little girl down the hall in a place full of sterile walls and overwhelming fear. A four-year-old boy dragging an IV stand became a source of comfort.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

She was down the hall from me, and I don't remember how she and I connected, but somehow we became friends, but she wouldn't eat, and she wouldn't eat for anybody except me. And so I convinced her that she needs to eat. So every time I'd go on my little walks um with my IV in tow, you know, uh, I would go in and check on her and and that, and she ended up getting better before I did and got out of there.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

During his darkest, most painful nights in that hospital bed, when the last rites were nearly read to him, Jake experienced something else. A profound spiritual shift that completely redirected his childhood.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

I believe I had some sort of vision. I had a calling to become a preacher. Because that's when I first started saying I was gonna be a preacher when I grow up, because I believe that I saw something that night that I was probably at my worst, and I couldn't sleep, I was in a lot of pain, and I believed that I had some sort of episode that was spiritual in nature. When I got home, though, and I started telling that story. Now, of course, my mom believes me, I'm her baby, she's gonna believe me. And at the time, Reverend Williams was still living, and I had told him what I had experienced, and and of course he's gonna be supportive, but I don't know if he quite believed it either. Uh but uh that started a long journey of me uh wanting to be a preacher, a pastor um when I got older. I used to carry a Bible to school, all kinds of wear suits, all kinds of stuff I used to do as a direct result of that time in the hospital. You know, I always thought that was fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 17:00

Jake didn't end up becoming a full-time pastor. Life, as he says, has a way of happening. He went into the Navy, got his degrees, and faced subsequent health challenges, including a 2009 emergency surgery that was directly linked back to the internal scar tissue from 1991. But the legacy of that Mother's Day remains carved into his worldview. When you ask Jake how people react when he tells them he survived an accordion-style head crushing from a conversion van, he smiles.

SPEAKER_01 17:36

Some people believe it. I remember telling the story. We were at the Rotary Club in Bourbonet, and I told this story, and my mom was with me, and someone leaned over to her and said, Did that really happen? And she said, Did it? Oh, it happened. And he left a lot out, but it happened.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

But Jake's life is a testament to the idea that sometimes the very thing that runs you over is the thing that uncovers what was going to kill you anyway. This One Time in Kankakee is produced by me, Jake Lamore, and the WVLI Podcast Network. Special thanks to Jake Lee for sharing his story. If you have a story to share, shoot me an email at Jake at Milner MediaPartners.com and finish this sentence for me. This one time in Kankakee. Support for this one time in Kankakee comes from Lamore Realty, located in downtown Mantino. Amazing real estate brokerage proudly serving Kankiki County and the surrounding areas. Visit LamoreRealty.com and follow them on Facebook and Instagram at Lamore Realty.