After sustaining a traumatic brain injury in a motorcycle accident five years ago, it seemed as if Jimi King’s dream of becoming a full-time firefighter vanished in an instant.
Doctors at St. Anthony’s Hospital, who had at first given him just a 1% chance of surviving the crash, were slightly more hopeful after King came out of a four-day coma. Even so, he’d need to endure three months of rehabilitation at Craig Hospital, teaching himself how to walk, talk and eat again before he could even think about setting long-term life goals.
But when King was discharged in December of 2017, he went after firefighting with the same determination that made him a star pitcher at Green Mountain High School, described during his senior year by The Denver Post as a “hard-throwing lefty.”