‘My boy Brock': Ryan Topper repeated those words while holding his friend’s neck in place

Gregg Doyel | IndyStar

Show Caption Hide Caption 'My boy Brock': How one friend's love saved two lives The love of Ryan Topper's for his high school friend, Brock Meister, not only helped save Brock's life, but — in an unusual twist — it may have saved the life of Brock's brother, too.

What happens when the lights are on and everybody’s watching, that’s not who we are. But for the sake of argument, this happens when the lights are on and everybody’s watching Ryan Topper: He scores touchdowns.

Topper is a sophomore receiver at UIndy. He didn’t play much last year as a freshman, catching two passes, though one was a touchdown. But back in high school? He was a scoring machine at Bremen High, setting the school record with 29 TD’s, most notably the sectional championship of his senior year against Cass. He touched the ball seven times that night and scored five touchdowns, including catches of 70 and 43 yards and a run of 54.

Scoring touchdowns, it’s what Ryan Topper does. But that’s not who he is.

This is who he is:

No lights, because it’s almost 11 p.m. on a dark country road when the brown Ford 250 is destroyed. The truck hits ice and flips violently, an accident that shuts off the engine, the battery, the headlights. Nobody’s watching on the night of Jan. 12, because this nightmare is happening on an isolated stretch of 4th Road near the Plymouth-Goshen Trail near Bremen, 20 miles south of South Bend. No witnesses, as Ryan Topper saves his best friend’s life.

“My boy Brock,” Ryan is saying, over and over, keeping Brock Meister calm.

Nobody’s watching as Ryan cradles Brock’s head in his hands, holding him still, alarmed by the three words his friend keeps saying:

My neck, Brock keeps saying.

Ambulance, he keeps saying.

Ryan Topper doesn’t know what has happened to the inner workings of his friend’s neck and skull. He has no idea that Brock has just suffered a catastrophic injury that kills most people instantly and kills almost everybody else in the moments afterward, when those poor souls who experience the unspeakable something called “internal decapitation” don’t have a friend like Ryan Topper at their side, cradling their head when nobody is watching, speaking softly to keep them calm. To keep them still:

“My boy Brock,” Ryan is saying. “My boy Brock.”

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* * *

In the car ahead, Ryan Topper looks into his rear-view mirror and sees only darkness. One moment he and some friends are in a multi-car caravan headed for Lake of the Woods, where Brock Meister’s grandparents have a home on the water, and in the next moment, Topper is alone. The headlights in his rear-view mirror, Brock’s headlights, are gone.

Ryan stops his own truck. Unable to see out his ice-covered windows, he opens the door and peers down the loneliness of 4th Road. Ah, there it is: He makes out Brock’s F250 stalled next to the road, where it must have hit some ice and spun to a stop. Ryan starts back that way, his headlights illuminating Brock’s truck, and it doesn’t look so bad; no scratches on the driver’s side. His phone rings. It’s Brock’s cousin, who’d been driving Brock’s truck. She’s screaming. From what Ryan Topper can make out, Brock is in the passenger seat, and he’s not doing so well.

Now Ryan is standing next to the truck, walking around to Brock’s side. Now he sees.

The passenger door is crumpled, the window blown out. There are sticks – are those cornstalks? – in Brock Meister's hair, and his face is covered in blood. What Ryan hadn’t seen happen moments earlier was a horror show:

The F250 hitting a sheet of ice on 4th Road, going into a spin and toppling over onto its side – the passenger side. Where Brock was sitting. The truck skids into the cornfield, the window explodes, and Brock’s face is being dragged along the frozen ground. The truck slows, rolls upright onto its wheels and comes to a stop. Now Brock’s upper body is dangling outside what used to be a window, and thank God he was wearing his seatbelt. Doctors say he would have died without it.

He is near death anyway, though nobody knows it right then. Only later, after doctors at Memorial Hospital in South Bend examine him, will anyone understand the medical miracle that is Brock Meister, and the role a UIndy wide receiver named Ryan Topper played to keep him alive.

* * *

They weren’t close, until they were. Until something just clicked.

Brock was a year older than Ryan, a year ahead at Bremen High, and they were two different kids. Ryan Topper played everything and played it well, all-conference as a baseball shortstop and basketball power forward, and twice all-state as a football receiver. Brock? He ran cross country in middle school, but then came the headaches in high school, the blurry vision. The brain tumor. A large mass in the middle of his brain, inoperable.

Five years before the nightmare in a cornfield near Lake of the Woods, Brock Meister nearly died as a high school sophomore. Doctors at Riley Hospital for Children saved him in October 2012 by inserting a shunt into his brain to relieve the swelling. Chemotherapy at Memorial Hospital shrank the tumor, and radiation at IU Health Proton Therapy Center in Bloomington finished it off.

At some point in the next few years, through friends of friends, Ryan and Brock found each other. They bonded over their passion for trucks – each had a Ford F250 – though Brock’s passion was a bit more, shall we say, passionate.

“That truck was my baby,” Brock says.

“His baby for sure,” Ryan says. “Every day he’s washing it up, putting on a spray wax. I mean, every day.”

They’d detail their trucks together, then take a pontoon out to the sand bar at Lake of the Woods, where Ryan and Brock and other friends from Bremen would throw footballs or Frisbees, eat, hang out. Ryan went to UIndy while Brock stayed home in Plymouth, working for the family business, J & T Meister Construction, but they hung out whenever Ryan was home. He was home for UIndy’s winter break the night of Jan. 12, just up the road from Brock’s truck when it hits the ice, turns over and crumples against the frozen farmland.

Ryan never saw his best friend dangling out the window; Brock’s cousin had pulled him back into the truck, where he sat slumped in the passenger seat. Now Ryan is at the side of the truck, Brock’s side, watching through the shattered window as his best friend struggles against the seatbelt and repeats himself: my neck … ambulance.

One of those weird things, but Ryan has recently taken a CPR certification course. His mom, Lisa Brown, teaches it at Bremen Castings Inc., the gray iron foundry owned by her husband and Ryan’s stepdad, J.B. Brown. Thanks to that course, Ryan has a keen understanding that Brock – my neck … ambulance – needs to stop moving.

Ryan pulls at the door handle, but it doesn’t move. The door is crumpled like tin foil, pinned shut. He pulls again. Nothing. Brock keeps saying those words – my neck … ambulance – and something happens to Ryan Topper. A surge of adrenaline, is all he can guess. Whatever the case, he pulls again and the door comes flying off.

Now Ryan is holding his friend’s head and patting him on the chest, saying “my boy Brock” and urging his friend, who is cold and scared and squirming under the seatbelt, to be still. Ryan stops patting his chest long enough to call 911, to explain their location and situation. Brock is listening. He remembers how calm Ryan sounded on the phone.

“I remember everything from that night,” Brock says. “That’s why everybody thought I wasn’t hurt so bad, because of the way I responded.”

Only later will anyone understand that Brock’s skull has been mostly unmoored from his spine, the ligaments holding the skull in place ripped apart, the skull – and the brain stem – tethered by little more than the spinal cord itself. Internal decapitation, it’s called. The technical term is atlanto-occipital dislocation, and research shows it is instantly fatal 70 percent of the time, and of those who survive initially, more than half die on their way to the hospital.

“Brock will tell you he tried to get up, but Ryan physically restrained him,” says Brock’s mom, Jenna Meister. “If he’d gotten up, he would have severed his spinal cord. Without Ryan’s quick thinking and calmness, I wholeheartedly think Brock wouldn’t be here.”

What followed for Brock was six intense weeks in the hospital, times when doctors weren’t sure he’d talk again, discouraging days when Brock didn’t want to see anybody.

Nobody was watching, so here’s what nobody saw: Nobody saw what Ryan Topper did next.

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* * *

Ryan is competing for a larger role on the 2018 UIndy team. He’s a big receiver, 6-3 and 205 pounds, and after spending most of last season in the slot, largely a blocking position in the UIndy offense, he went into this spring with a chance at a larger role after the graduation of leading receiver Garrett Willis.

But his friend. Back home, in the hospital.

His boy Brock.

Jan. 12 was a Friday night, the last weekend of UIndy’s winter break, and two days later Ryan Topper returned to school, to class, to the weight room, to offseason football activities. Back on campus he had a job to win, but he came home every weekend. He came back to see Brock.

“Sometimes he didn’t tell me he was coming up – he just surprised me at the hospital,” Brock says. “He’s just been amazing through all this. Ryan was always there for me. He always has been. He’s been there big-time for me now.”

At first Brock couldn’t talk, so he communicated with a white board and a marker. Ryan sat next to the bed, sat while Brock slept, waited for him to wake up and turn on the television. They’d watch quietly, together, until Ryan had to go back to school.

At times the visitors were overwhelming, and Brock was embarrassed by his condition: face scratched raw, feeding tube down his throat, neck in a brace. And he was gaunt, his 5-9, 132-pound frame down to 115 pounds.

“He’d come to see me and he’d be in the hall, and (my family) would always ask: ‘You want Ryan to come?’” Brock says. “Sometimes I was in the mood for company, sometimes not. ‘Yes, I want him to come.’ Every time. Topper was the only one.”

Over the course of these past eight months, Brock Meister has improved greatly. He suffered a spinal cord injury, and full recovery takes time, but he is well enough to have gotten out of the hospital, returned to the lake, saved a life of his own: his brother Collin, younger by two years.

They were at the lake last month when the family jet ski wouldn’t start. Collin hopped on, tried it again, and it exploded in a fireball that blew apart the jet ski and emptied engine oil and 10 gallons of gas onto the lake in a fiery slick. The explosion threw Collin into the burning water with broken bones in his back and foot, and a torn ACL.

Collin went under.

Brock, six months removed from his own nightmare, dived into the water, under the fire. He pulled his brother out.

“Doctors say he saved Collin,” Jenna Meister says

She’s feeling grateful these days, Jenna Meister. She has two sons, and each could have died in the past eight months. She was moved last week to write an email to UIndy football coach Bob Bartolomeo:

I’m writing you in regards to an amazing young man on your team named Ryan Topper …

In his office at UIndy, Coach Bart is reading her words, and he has no idea. A wide receiver on his team has literally saved someone’s life, then driven 2½ hours each week, each way, to sit in a quiet hospital room, and the kid – Ryan Topper – hasn’t said a word.

“I was flabbergasted,” Bartolomeo says of that email. “We practice on Saturday morning, we’re done at noon, and don’t do anything until Sunday night film. Ryan must have gone home and seen the kid and come back. I said, ‘Man, good for him.’ Then I called (Ryan’s) dad and told him how proud I was.”

Jenna Meister’s email to the UIndy coach continues: “As I’m sure you are aware,” she wrote, “most kids his age are understandably selfish. Not Ryan, he continues to put Brock first. Ryan has been the most caring and supportive friend I could ever want for my son. … His true character was revealed after my son’s accident.”

Revealed, when nobody was watching. But everyone sees it now.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.