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50 years later: Blodgett man recalls being struck by lightning
BLODGETT, Mo. — Few people get struck by lightning and live to tell about it, but that’s exactly what happened to Michael Dean “Mike” Riley of Blodgett 50 years ago.
It was at about 9 p.m. May 14, 1974, when a then 16-year-old Riley had been fishing with his family, and lightning struck their shore-bound fishing party on the Mississippi River, three miles south of Commerce, Missouri, killing Riley’s 31-year-old aunt, Mavis Riley. A bolt of lightning also struck Riley and his then 18-year-old friend, Gary Turner of Benton.
The day had started off like any normal fishing trip.
“I remember when we went, we were all really excited about going fishing,” Riley recalled. “It was a pretty nice day. We were catching a lot of fish, and then the storm came up. We built a fire to help dry out. We were getting ready to leave, actually. I guess with the fire, the water and all is what drew the lightning to strike.”
Riley said he didn’t hear the lightning hit, and he didn’t feel it either.
“When the lightning struck Aunt Mavis, it hit hurt directly and pretty much killed her instantly, they figured out,” Riley said. “And then the lightning went in the ground and it bounced up and came in my knee and then it blew out my elbow.”
Turner was standing beside Riley and the bolt shot through the top of his arm — and it blew a chunk out of his arm, Riley said.
“Then when the lightning hit the ground, of course, it was such a large jolt, it knocked everybody that was there out for just a few seconds,” Riley said.
Members of the party who escaped without injury were Riley’s father, Dean Riley who was 45 at the time, and his brother, Greg Riley, who was 12; James Colbert, then 50; Ruby Hurst, 36, Marty Hurst, 11, and Don Hurst, 43, all of Blodgett.
After the lightning strike, Riley said he fell near the fire.
“Being soak and wet, it was just like a baked potato,” Riley said. “It just peeled my hide. Ninety percent of my body was burnt.”
The only thing that wasn’t burnt was an area from one of his legs and down. Riley had third-degree burns all over his body.
“With being so wet, it didn’t burn my clothes; it just steamed me, and they didn’t know that until they got me to the hospital and started cutting my clothes off of me,” Riley said.
Riley was dragged from the fire by others in the group, and both he and Mavis Riley were each placed in a boat and given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
When the first boat reached the shore, Mavis Riley’s sister, Ruby Hurst, stopped at a house with a front porch light on in Commerce and used the phone to call her brother, Richard Riley of Blodgett. He met them at Benton at Highway E and took Mavis Riley to Missouri Delta Medical Center in Sikeston.
“As we got going back up the river, I tried to jump out because I was on fire and wanted to cool off,” Riley said. “Then I remember waking up and I was in the truck, going to the hospital, and that’s the last thing I remember until I woke up three days later and they told me that Aunt Mavis had gotten killed and they already had her funeral. It was that quick.”
Not being able to say goodbye to his aunt was hard for him, Riley said.
“Aunt Mavis and I were pretty good friends,” he said. “I went with her a lot. She was like a tomboy. We played pitch and catch together. We went fishing a lot together. She was a sports fanatic and real athletic.”
Riley doesn’t remember how long he was at the hospital in Sikeston, but he remembered how at night, he slept without any clothes with a cradle over his bed because of his burns.
“At night I would bend my leg and then I couldn’t straighten it out, and they put me in a whirl pool and tried to get it to straighten,” he said.
Riley ended up being transferred to Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.
“They lowered me down in a cradle – the water was 110 degrees – in a hot tub and left me in for 10 or 15 minutes with the water circulating, and it got all the dead skin off of me,” Riley said. “I had a therapist and he would work my leg back and forth in that hot water. I could get it to move, and then he brought me out and put me on the table. Then he worked with me.”
Riley said his therapist was about 6 feet, 4 inches tall and weighed 240 pounds.
“He was a big guy,” Riley said. “I was scared to death of him. He got me to moving my leg back and forth and then he’d make me ride a bicycle. There were some days that when he’d push on my leg and it would hurt so bad, he’d make me cry, and he’d say: ‘It’s the only way we’re going to get to it. You’re not going to be able to walk. You’re going to walk with a limp.’”
Riley said he screamed when they lowered him into the hot tub, but once he got in there, it felt so good.
“When I first got out of there, I felt great, but I sure dreaded going in there. I would fight them. Man, I didn’t want to go,” Riley recalled.
His parents, who had to work during the week, would visit him on the weekends.
“It was a chore for them back then — with six kids — to even be able to drive to St. Louis to come and see me. That was a hardship on the family,” Riley said.
Riley said he didn’t like being at the hospital all week by himself, but he also thinks it probably helped himself heal better and faster because his therapist stuck with his routine.
“Even though I cried, it wouldn’t do no good,” Riley said. “He’d say: ‘Well we gotta do it. Come on, Mike. Come on.’”
Riley said the therapist kept working with him, and finally Riley was able to ride a bicycle.
“At night, they put a brace on to lock my leg so I couldn’t bend it because that’s usually what would happen,” Riley said. “... Finally, they got it to where he told me: ‘Now, you need to ride a bicycle all summer.’”
When Riley was released from the hospital, his father got him a bicycle, and Riley rode it from Blodgett to Miner, where his dad worked, and back home every day.
Riley said he was told he’d never be able to walk correctly or he’d always walk with a limp, but within a year, he was feeling almost back to normal, and he was even able to play basketball.
“I couldn’t get a haircut for six months,” Riley said. “You’d run a comb through the back of my hair and it would bleed.”
Today, Riley has no complaints. His knee doesn’t bother him. His legs still don’t grow any hair, but that’s just fine, he said.
The incident even earned Riley the nickname “Zombie,” which he said he doesn’t mind.
“We went to a basketball camp in Arkansas, and there was a ballplayer down there and he gave me that nickname,” Riley said. “We were playing cards, and I ended up beating him. They said: ‘Well, you know he’s pretty lucky. He got struck by lightning and they didn’t know if he was gonna live or die for three days.’ And he goes: ‘He’s a walking zombie?!’”
And the nickname just stuck.
“A lot of people don’t even know my real name. They just call me Zombie,” Riley said.
Riley said he thinks about the fishing trip every year on its anniversary.
“When a storm comes up, people remind me to get inside,” Riley said.
While he’s not bothered by storms, whenever they go fishing now, if there’s any chance of storms, they don’t chance it, he said.
According to the National Weather Service, a person has a 1-in-15,300 chance of getting struck by lightning in their lifetime. The odds of being struck multiple times is even less, with the record being seven times in one lifetime.
About 40 million lightning touch the ground down in the country every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are less than one in a million, and almost 90% of all lightning strike victims survive.
From 2006 through 2021, there were 444 lightning strike deaths in the United States, according to the CDC.
“It was crazy how quick that storm came up,” Riley said. “Being on the water, that rain seems to follow the river and then, of course, water attracts the lightning and then we had the fire.”
Riley said his group was in a little chute that went around and made an island, and they were on that island when the storm hit.
“You’re surrounded by water and you got trees and fire and then that storm come up and it started lightning,” Riley said. “At that time time, you didn’t know as much as we know now. It was just a freak accident that it happened.”