“The very first thing he said when he was conscious was “How am I going to fence?” Brittany remembered.
Without a sidestep or a flinch, she told him he’d do it on a prosthetic leg or however he could, but he would do it:
“I said, ‘We’re going to be positive!’”
And now, 7½ years since the grueling accident — in a span filled with intense rehab, personal struggle and resolve, a return to full-time police work less than a year after he was hurt and some wondrous reward since — Branch will represent the United States, the Dayton community, its police force, and especially, his wife, their two young daughters and himself when he competes as a fencer at the 2024 Paralympic Games, which open Wednesday in Paris.
He’s leaving for France Sunday.
He’ll carry the flag in front of the six U.S. fencers at the opening ceremonies.
He’s competing in foil. His first match is Sept. 4, which will be a busy day of competition that concludes with a late evening gold-medal match. Team foil competition begins Sept. 5.
Brittany and their girls — 8-year-old Chloe and 6-year-old Peyton — leave Tuesday and will be in the crowd at the historic Grand Palais with its magnificent nave and glass roof, in part because of the generosity of friends and complete strangers who’ve been moved by Byron’s story.
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It was first told in length in the Dayton Daily News 14 months ago and last month was amplified to a national audience when, thanks to a fortuitous connection, he appeared on an episode of Fox & Friends.
Up until then, the Paris dream and his Miami Valley reality didn’t mesh when it came to monetary concerns.
He has no sponsors and unlike athletes from nations like China and India, U.S. Paralympians are not bankrolled by the government.
That means he paid most of his training and travel expenses out of his own pocket. In the past year he’s competed around the globe from Thailand to England and Italy. In 2019, when he was trying to position himself for the Tokyo Games, he traveled to 10 nations on four continents.
“As it was getting down to the end here, he’d maxed out some of our credit cards for all this and there were still two competitions to go,” Brittany said. “I was worried when this was all over we were going to be sitting with big bills.”
After Branch made the team — following a strong performance in Brazil that boosted his qualifying points — he got the unexpected invite to appear on Fox and Friends.
“My cousin is best friends with the CEO of Fox News,” Brittany said. “When she saw Byron won in Brazil, she said she was going to see if Suzanne (executive Suzanne Scott) would have him on a show and maybe it would help with the GoFundMe account that had been set up for him (by his sister-in-law and a cousin).”
Branch was brought to the Fox Studios in the heart of Rockefeller Center and sat down with Ainsley Earhardt for a brief interview that struck a chord with people around the nation.
“My GoFundMe page exploded, and we raised like 40 grand in two days,” he said.
As of Friday, 836 people had donated $53,234 to the account.
“We are able to breathe again,” Brittany said.
People were moved, not just by what had happened to Branch, but how he’d approached the tragedy afterward.
“When something like this happens to you, it doesn’t have to define you,” he said. “It doesn’t have to stop you.
“You just keep pushing to where you want to be.”
‘Your country needs you’
Branch was introduced to fencing during gym class at Northmont High School and by the time he graduated in 2003, he was one of the top prep fencers in the state.
When he went to Wright State — where he got an undergrad degree in international studies with an emphasis on Eastern European politics and the Cold War; and then went to graduate school to study international comparative politics — he taught fencing.
By 2010, he had an A rating. He said he used to follow the Olympic Games, but never fantasized about being an Olympian:
“I knew all the training it took. They don’t do anything outside of that. That’s their job — training.
“My whole goal back then was just to maintain my rating and try to make the world veteran team when I turned 40 this year.”
In the meantime, he was building a life beyond his sport.
Brittany, who is three years younger than Byron, grew up in Bellbrook and graduated from Wright State.
They met at a Halloween party and when we spoke last year, she told me her attraction to him was described best by a friend who said: “Being around Byron feels like the sun came out.”
Early in 2016, life was really sunny for Branch.
He’d become a Dayton policeman and he and Brittany had just had Chloe.
But everything changed on Dec. 16, 2016.
“It had been cold out and then the weather took a severe turn and got icy,” he said. “I was driving down Wayne Avenue just before midnight when I heard a call that there was a crash on I-75 involving two cars, then 4 and 5, and then 7.”
He went to help, but before he got there he came upon another crash — where US 35 joins northbound I-75 near downtown Dayton — where a car had rear-ended a semi.
He motioned to the Michigan truck driver, who was out of his damaged truck, to come to the passenger side of his patrol car so they’d be “safe.”
He said he remembers nothing after that until he awoke at Miami Valley Hospital following the first of what would be four surgeries.
He’s been told about the spinning SUV hitting his patrol car and pinning him between the vehicles until he finally crumpled to the pavement, severely injured and bleeding excessively from an open wound to his destroyed right leg.
He was drifting in and out of consciousness and in danger of bleeding to death until some of his fellow officers arrived and a tourniquet — applied by fellow rookie officer Bryan Camden — was fastened to his leg.
That kept him alive and enabled a rescue squad to transport him to the hospital just before I-75 was shut down because of numerous, multi-car wrecks.
Brittany said police officers showed up at the door of their Bellbrook home after midnight and told her she needed to come with them to the hospital. At the time, Chloe was eight months old and suddenly Brittany felt as if she were freefalling:
“For the first three hours, I thought Byron was dead.”
Finally, she was told he was alive, but — in a difficult “life over limb” decision, as trauma surgeon Dr. A. Peter Ekeh described it — his right leg had been amputated.
“I was relieved,” she said. “I was like, ‘OK, we’ll be fine.’”
Both she and Byron now admit that was easier said than done.
“I’d been going to the gym six days a week, but when I first got back after the accident, I found out real quick the toll that had been taken on my body,” he once told me. “I was able to do just five pullups, and it felt like I ran three miles. I lay on the ground and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is miserable.’”
He said he lost 43 pounds in the hospital, but was quick to point out: “They said my amputated leg probably weighed 15 or 20 of those pounds.”
He got his prosthetic five months after the accident and began to learn how to walk again.
He said he had a “fantastic” physical therapist who had him walk all the steps at the Dayton Art Institute and at Sinclair:
“She took me to a construction site and had me walk all around to get used to different terrains, and she took me to that tall building on McFadden (Ave.) where the firefighters train and had me walk those steps. She really pushed me.”
He returned to light duty within seven months and was back patrolling East Dayton 364 days after he’d been hurt.
Behind the scenes though, it was challenging, Brittany said: “Initially everything was OK, but once the adrenaline wore off, I had some PTSD. Our second daughter (Peyton) had arrived and there was a lot of stress.
“And a year or so after his accident, Byron found himself getting angry. He was still grieving his loss. That second year was tough for both of us and took a lot of therapy and family support.”
Regardless of the strain, the couple did good deeds whenever they could, including buying Christmas gifts for kids in need around town.
Branch was named the Dayton Police Officer of the Year in 2018 and three years later he won the department’s prestigious Steve Whalen Memorial Policing Award for his work in the community, especially in mentoring youth.
Although he initially said he had no interest in wheelchair fencing, that changed when he got a letter from a USA Fencing in 2018.
“It said he’d been good at able-bodied fencing, and they didn’t have a lot of wheelchair fencers with prior experience,” Brittany said.
“Then they added something cheesy at the end, like ‘Your country needs you!’
“But there also was a sponsor for him, so he decided to give it a try.”
The sport is far different for wheelchair fencers than their able-bodied counterparts — you can’t rely on your legs to create distance — and when he entered the International Wheelchair Amputee Sports Federation Americas Championship in Saskatoon, Canada, he’d had just two seated matches.
Still, he won gold.
He then won his next tournament in Brazil.
He was focusing on the Tokyo Games until COVID postponed everything and he ended up not competing.
In the meantime, the unthinkable happened.
In 2019, he was hit again on I-75.
“It was the same thing. I was out on the highway and the weather was horrible,” he said. “Some girl wrecked her Jeep where Route 4 turns into 75 going south. It was right at the bottom of that huge overpass that turns down. It’s a blind curve coming around it.
“When pulled up. I said, ‘OK, I’ve got some experience in this. Let’s get in my car to talk.’”
“She was in the back, and I was up front when a car going 60 miles an hour smashed into us.
“The back window was smashed into my back seat. My shotgun was knocked out of the rack and the computers were knocked off. So were the windshield cameras. It was super dusty inside and I was coughing, but we were both OK.
“The girl who hit us was 16 and had just gotten her license. She’d never driven in bad weather. She was terrified.
“The first thing that went through my mind was, ‘How am I going to get on the radio and say, ‘I just got hit by a car!’ and not have everybody lose their minds?”
Family trip
Branch and I talked the other day just after he’d finished patrolling around a University of Dayton neighborhood where a guy had been breaking into cars.
He’s continued with his full-time police work while going through regular fencing training both in West Chester and at Ohio State — where he was mentored by Buckeyes’ assistant coach Elvis Gil, who was an Olympic medalist for Cuba. Recently, he’s also worked at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.
In the process, she has shouldered many of the responsibilities of the rest of their lives.
Byron said he’s happy Brittany and their daughters will get to come to Paris. They’ll stay in an Airbnb while he lives in the Athletes Village.
They weren’t able to get tickets to the sold-out Opening Ceremony, but they will see him compete and Brittany has plans for them to see several of the city’s iconic sights.
Byron said his daughters — Chloe is in third grade, Peyton is in first — aren’t sure what to make of the whole trip. They know they have a long plane ride and will miss nine or 10 days of school.
Brittany said she talked to their principals and a plan has been worked out:
“They’re both supposed to keep journals and report back to their class. And I think Byron is going to speak to each of their classes and maybe to a couple of others, too.”
Byron’s already thought of that: “I figure I’ll bring in all my gear and some of the free stuff I get over there, too. I want them to see it all.”
Although he didn’t mention it — he’s not one for self-professed atta-boys — hopefully the show-n-tell centerpiece will be an Olympic medal.
The positive approach Brittany insisted on back at Miami Valley Hospital several years ago seems to keep on working.
“Really, that’s Byron. He doesn’t do anything halfway,” she said, before pausing, then laughing.
“Well, except maybe chores around the house.”
As they say in fencing:
“Touche!”
Credit: Lynch, Gregory
Credit: Lynch, Gregory
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