Meet Rob Wills: Big man, bigger heart *
by
Ruben Rosario
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Demetrius Byas, 1-year-old son in tow, walks into the teen center at Mary's Place the other day and spots Rob Wills.
"Rob! Rob!" Byas, 22, who spent time at the homeless shelter and transitional housing complex in downtown Minneapolis during his teens, called out from across the raucous center teeming with kids.
Wills turned his wheelchair and spotted a familiar face. Moments later, Byas gingerly set the little boy into the tree-trunk-size forearms of the 45-year-old teen center manager. The boy's name is Kayden Robert Byas, the middle name a tribute to Wills.
[....]
A CRASH, DESPAIR, GRIT
Indestructible. That's how Wills felt the Thursday night in 1987 when he went bar hopping with friends. He was 19, working road construction, bulked up from weightlifting, a sport that he took up while wrestling at Cooper High School in New Hope.
Rarely carded, he was pretty pasted by the time he left the last watering hole and piled into the back of a friend's pickup truck. His friend, who worked a double shift that day, apparently fell asleep at the wheel as they drove home. Witnesses said the vehicle jumped a curb on the freeway and struck a concrete bridge underpass wall at high speed. Wills landed hard on two stationary propane tanks in the rear of the pick-up.
He regained consciousness a week later in the hospital. He was surrounded by his parents and family members, and about to be informed of his fate by a physician he described as a "great neurologist but with the bedside manner of a rock."
The doctor told Wills that he broke his back and was now a paraplegic. Wills would not walk again. The doctor added in his blunt prognosis that the friends he had then would abandon him, that he would have difficulty romancing women and would be lucky to lift 30 pounds.
Devastated, he prayed to God to take him to spare him and his family the grief and anguish of his lot in life.
Mark Copeland, a close friend since second grade, told him to stop the nonsense; he gave him a poster with inspirational words about not quitting during the darkest of times.
He left the hospital after two months of rehab and followed it up with six months of intensive therapy at a Courage Center facility. One day, he forced his brother to take him to a fitness center to see how much he could lift. He bench-pressed 225 pounds.
[A year later, he ended up working at Mary's Place ...]
He [had gone] into the center the first day with preconceived notions: a crippled man in a wheelchair, surrounded by tough, hardscrabble kids from tough places in Minnesota and across the nation wrest-ling with different kinds of weights on their family lives -- addiction, neglect, loss of jobs, parental abandonment.
These kids are not going to listen to me, he thought. I'm not going to last six minutes.
His welcome wagon that day was a 6-year-old tyke named Manny Lee. The boy, who witnessed his older sisters being prostituted by his crack-addicted single mom, challenged him to a game of pool and "kicked my butt."
That boy now is 22 and works the front desk at Mary's Place.
"He's one of my sons," Wills said. "My preconceived notions were all wrong. These kids are kids, no matter what color or background. These are kids deprived of the blessings I had, of going out to play without fear of gunshots. But if you have one person who believes in you, miracles can happen."
'TREASURE QUIET MOMENTS'
The little miracles in Wills' life include Seville Hill, another former resident who serves as Wills' assistant manager. There's a kid from Iraq nicknamed Wally who came to the center in his teens with his family.
"He went into a supermarket right before it was struck by a (suicide) bomb," Wills said. The lone survivor of the blast, Wally is now in his early 20s, attending college and "doing well."
There's Rika Shabazz, 18, an academically gifted and overachieving former resident who last year won a full scholarship to Williams College, a private school in Williams-town, Mass.
"He's helped me to escape life and just treasure quiet moments of peace in the midst of chaos," Shabazz said in an email. "God broke the mold when he made that man. He looks at all of those children down there. Thousands of kids have passed through his hands, under his watch at that shelter -- none of them has felt shorted of love, no matter if it was missing at home."
She signed the email with this: "From his daughter with much love."
There's Remy Martin Marnier Pitchford, a former ward of the state, at 16 a sullen-looking manchild with the baritone voice of a Barry White when he walked into the center for the first time. His addicted mom, now a recovering alcoholic, named all of her five children after alcoholic beverages. Remy has a sister named Champagne and a brother named Hennessy.
Wills hooked him on weightlifting at the center and a belief that he could accomplish anything and be whomever he wanted to be, regardless of his circumstances.
The former Arlington High School student from St. Paul has won several competitions, has broken state weightlifting records and now works as a personal trainer at a fitness facility.
"I don't see a man in a wheelchair when I see Rob," Pitchford said. "I see a man 6-foot-7, the biggest guy in the world with a big heart."
ANSWERED PRAYERS
They all keep in contact with Wills and, like Byas, occasionally drop by the center to say hello or help out with the estimated 475 kids who live in Mary's Place at any given time.
He works 40 hours on paper, but really 24/7, said his wife of eight years, Marci Wills, a longtime physical education teacher at elementary schools. His phone rings at all hours from "his sons and daughters."
"These kids give me so much," Wills said. "They make me want to go to work every day."
I asked him why a man paralyzed for life can feel so blessed.
He recalled one winter day when he was 17, two years before the accident. He was lying in bed at home with a boombox on his chest, listening to music, watching the snow fall outside. He struck up a conversation with God, he said.
"I said, 'God, in my life all I want is to have lots of kids, I want to have a job I love, I want to be loved by lots of people, and I want to marry a beautiful woman,' " he said. " 'I don't want to be rich. I don't want to be famous. That's all I want."
"I didn't know that I would end up in a wheelchair and go through a lot of crap to get here," he added, his voice now cracking a bit. "But God answered every one of my prayers."
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* Source: Ruben Rosario, Saint Paul Pioneer Press/Columnists, 11/28/2013
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