With crash in past, KC-area family is ‘spokesfamily’ for Ronald McDonald House
It did not take long for Jevon and Julie McBride to forgive the teen whose car, late on an Oct. 7, 2016 night, drifted across the lane of a Warrensburg road, hurtling their bodies and futures into a direction they never envisioned.
Jevon, a then 32-year-old Air Force staff sergeant at Whiteman Air Force Base, lay in his twisted car with his right femur cracked and ankle shattered. Julie, age 30 and six months pregnant, could feel the fluid of her now-endangered pregnancy pooling around her. They had waited 10 years, through three miscarriages, hormone shots, and countless tears to have a pregnancy that lasted.
The next morning, Julie lay at St. Luke’s Hospital and later Children’s Mercy, holding Julianna, their fragile daughter born at 1 pound and 11 ounces, uncertain she would survive.
“Our father who art in heaven,” Julie had prayed as she lay in the car. “… Save my baby. I don’t care if anything happens to me. Save my baby and Jevon.”
Jevon is now 41. Juliana will turn 10 in October.
On Thursday, the family, now living in Lee’s Summit, appeared on national television — as guests of “The Jennifer Hudson Show” — to share their story as part of an announcement that they had been chosen to be the “spokesfamily” globally for the Ronald McDonald House.
First started in Philadelphia in 1974, more than 250 Ronald McDonald Houses now exist worldwide, providing free or low-cost lodging and meals in a “home away from home” for the families of critically ill or injured children receiving care at local hospitals. The Ronald McDonald House of Kansas City is at 2502 Cherry St., near Children’s Mercy Hospital.
“We’re doing great. Juliana is thriving daily. She is defying all the odds,” Julie McBride said in a Zoom interview Friday, just prior to the 3 p.m. airing of “The Jennifer Hudson Show” in Kansas City. The family taped the segment in February.
In January 2017, The Star first chronicled the McBrides’ story in a piece, “First came love, then came marriage — then, after a head-on wreck, a beautiful baby,” that was picked up the military news publication Stars and Stripes and went global. Another story followed in April, “Parents of baby born after head-on wreck say God had a purpose — hope and forgiveness.” In August 2017, a third story told of Juliana getting glasses that allowed her to see her parents clearly for the first time.
“So much has changed,” Julie said of Juliana in the intervening nine years. Their daughter has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, hydrocephalus, which is an accumulation of fluid around the brain, and dystonia, a neurological movement disorder. “Back then, we didn’t know what she was able to do. We just knew that she had this huge brain injury. We knew that she had hydrocephalus, and the prognosis wasn’t good.
“But she has been determined and continued to defy everything that the doctors said that she wouldn’t do. She had met so many milestones and is doing amazing.”
Including: Juliana is talking. “We never thought she would do that,” Julie said.
Juliana “has the things that she loves to do,” she said.
“She loves to go to baseball. Concerts. Taylor Swift. She loves independence and to do things for herself. She has her friend group, She loves swimming, traveling. She loves the beach. That is, by far, her most favorite thing.”
Juliana uses a wheelchair. She attends Cedar Creek Elementary School, splitting her time — 50% in her third-grade classes and 50% in special education classes. Her mother said that she is soon to receive a new robotic machine that helps her walk and will do so “after she gets clearance from her doctor.”
“Every time we have a meeting with her teacher, she is just soaring,” Julie said.
In 2019, Jevon medically retired from the military and now does security for the federal government. Both said that Ronald McDonald House has been instrumental in their lives, saving them a significant amount of money on the occasions Juliana received care at Children’s Mercy and they traveled from Warrensburg.
“There’s no way that we could have made that happen,” Julie said. “We continued to use the Ronald McDonald House after Juliana left the NICU, when she had to go up for MRI and other brain surgery and when she needed hip surgery during COVID. … We didn’t have to worry about drinks, snacks, anything, toiletries.
“It was nice to come home from the NICU every day, or even when I visited Jevon in the hospital, and to be able to know that we were safe, that we had a place to stay, and that everything was taken care of.”
