Bell Employee

Ty Satter

Fargo, N.D.

Recipients

Dean and Heidi Vetter

The Need

An avid cyclist, Dean Vetter says he’d crossed the railroad tracks going through the tiny town of Halstad, Minn., a hundred times. But this time, his bicycle wheel dropped into a crack, flipping Dean from his bike. A passing car stopped, the driver using Dean’s phone to call 911 as well as his wife, Heidi.

Dean couldn’t move, except to turn his head. A helicopter ambulance landed in the field next to him – and from that point on, Dean remembers little. For Heidi, though, the aftermath is a vivid memory.

“I started driving, but then I could see the ambulance,” she says. “I’m asking him, ‘What hurts?’ And he’s like, ‘I cannot move.’”

A surgeon told her, “I do not know how this man survived. He should not be here.”

After an emergency surgery, doctors recommended the Vetters travel to Colorado’s Craig Hospital, one of the nation’s top rehabilitation centers for people with brain or spinal cord injuries.

The Impact

Bell team member Ty Satter had grown up knowing the Vetters, whose son Brett was a high school teammate.

“Football became a big thing for our two families together,” agrees Heidi. “We’ve remained close friends.”

Ty was shocked to hear of Dean’s accident – and decided right away to start a Pay It Forward pool to help the Vetters with expenses. Rallying his colleagues, Ty pulled together More than $6,000 for the family.

It’s the kind of support, Dean says, that drives him to get better. He continues to focus on his therapy and getting his family back to normal, whatever that will be for them given the mobility challenges Dean faces.

Help from Ty and others, Dean adds, “is not going unnoticed. It will be used in the best way possible.”

Through the Pay It Forward program, Bell gives employees money each year to donate to people in need and causes they care about.