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From bomb survivor in Vietnam to life in Missouri, this paralympian is a living miracle
Vahe Gregorian
Sun, August 22, 2021, 5:00 AM
If “Soul Surfer” and “The Blind Side” had a child, Shelly Shepherd will tell you, it would be in the story of her seventh child, Haven, born in Quang Nam Province, Vietnam, with the fitting name of Phuong — a derivation of which translates as “phoenix.”
“Rising phoenix,” Shelly Shepherd said, “rising out of the fire.”
With a shattering parallel: She was 14 months old when her biological father attached bombs to himself and Haven’s birth mother, held their girl in between and ignited them.
In what the Shepherds initially were told was a family murder-suicide spurred by desperate poverty and shame over their child born out of wedlock with each parent married to others, the mother and father died immediately.
Somehow, their daughter was propelled 30 to 40 feet, her legs maimed, and then found in the flames outside the hut. And if you want to know something about the indomitable spirit that sustained her through such trauma and led her to love life, you can get a glimpse through her radiant demeanor and sense of humor.
“You know what Michael Jordan and I have in common?” Haven, now 18, said with her infectious laugh. “We were both airborne.”
If that sounds jarring, she quickly says, “Life is too good to be serious; I just know so many people who take life so seriously.”
The origin story has puzzles and gaps, including the mystery of why an older sister was in the hut but evidently excluded from the horrific act. Explosives experts, Shelly Shepherd said, would say no way the toddler could have survived between two bombs.
And years later, Shelly and her husband, Rob, were given some different information: that the birth mother also had been entirely a victim after discovering the father had another family and kicked him out, leading to him returning to kill her.
Still, all versions and possibilities of the story have the one universal element that really matters: miracle upon miracle upon miracle, Shelly Shepherd believes.
That’s what allowed Haven to live through the blasts … and through a surely harrowing ride on the back of a motorcycle through rugged jungle terrain to the nearest hospital in Da Nang … and to have her legs so expertly amputated there as to amaze doctors at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City … and to be right where the Shepherds needed her to be, a mere 8,510 miles away from home, at a crucial time in their own lives …
Haven Shepherd’s success athletically has an incredible amount of hard work behind it. Here, she works out in Joplin.
And now to represent the United States as a swimmer in the Tokyo Paralympic Games.
“Windmills, my arms are,” Haven said, smiling, a few weeks before leaving for Tokyo and her scheduled competitions in the 200-meter individual medley (Aug. 28) and 100-meter breaststroke (Sept. 1).
As for her prosthetic legs, she considers them the ultimate fashion accessory and says, “Just put that I L-O-V-E my legs.”
So when she hears someone say they were an accident of birth, she’ll think of how she was the accident of all accidents … and how it led her to the life she was meant to live all along.
Because sometimes everything can just look and feel different when you’re thankful for what you have instead of rueful over what you don’t, she believes — and her story validates.
Finding sanctuary, but also providing refuge
“Soul Surfer” is the autobiography made into a movie about Bethany Hamilton’s life as a surfer after losing her arm in a shark attack; “The Blind Side” was Michael Lewis’ book, which also became a movie, about football player Michael Oher and his adoptive parents.
And those themes converge in the tale of Haven, who found sanctuary in the Shepherds but also provided a certain sort of refuge herself.
“We rescued her,” said Shelly, a woman of Christian conviction and seemingly boundless generosity. “But in so many ways she rescued us, too.”
Shelly Shepherd, left, hugging adopted daughter Haven, says she and husband Rob “rescued her. But in so many ways she rescued us, too.”
Rob and Shelly already had four daughters and two sons, each a love story of their own. As was the relationship between the couple that goes back to their teens.
But in 2000, Terry Shepherd, Rob’s brother and co-owner of the family business, Mid-America Hardwoods and Heritage Oak Flooring, died in a ghastly truck accident after a company picnic.
Five years after their father, Gary, had died at age 59 suffering a heart attack, Rob was devastated.
“We really lost him for a while,” said Shelly, grief-stricken herself over the death of Terry, who also was the husband of her sister, Rhonda.
A year went by, and then another. But Shelly couldn’t seem to reach Rob and came to think, “This is him now. He’s here, but he’s not here.”
Meanwhile, in 2002, Shelly attended what she called a motivational talk about orphans suffering in other countries. She felt her heart pounding. The feeling became so urgent, she said, that it was almost an obsession.
As it happens, that was right around the time Haven was conceived half a world away.
At the mention of that as they spoke in their home the other week, Haven shrugged and called herself an “oopsie” baby.
Or was she?
“Exactly,” she said, smiling.
‘The light would come back in his eyes’
Rob was resistant to the idea.
But over time, he became persuaded to at least take a trip to Vietnam with Pam and Randy Cope, co-founders of the Touch A Life foundation that seeks to change the world one child at a time in the wake of the death of their oldest son, Jantsen, in 1999.
The Copes had sought to find a home for Haven in the United States, The Associated Press wrote, after her story had become well-known in Vietnam. They went with the aim of bringing her home to another family in Missouri and already had a name for her in this new life: Faith.
Moreover, even Shelly had not necessarily been inclined to adopt a child with disabilities.
But all of that abruptly changed.
Almost instantly, she said, the child was nuzzling up to Rob as he held her on a beach — a scene they have on video footage that might make a sensitive person mist up.
“Every time she would love on him,” Shelly said, “the light would come back in his eyes.”
Athletic and poised in several sports, Haven Shepherd has traveled the world competing for the United States.
To say nothing of how smitten Shelly was. By Day Three of the journey, with Haven wearing her sunglasses and giggling as she flipped her around, Shelly could feel something so powerful inside that she compared it to a sense of conception itself.
“This is my child,” she knew.
Only … she wasn’t. At least not immediately with the girl set to be adopted by the other family.
To Shelly, the attachment already was so profound that she found herself crying on the cold floor of her hotel, grieving a loss, thinking she might never be able to stop.
Instead, shortly after they returned, Pam Cope called Shelly to tell her that it wasn’t working out as smoothly as hoped with the other family for various reasons, including some complications with another child of about the same age in the house.
It was time for Haven to come home where she belonged, where she’d immediately also have loving siblings then ranging in age from 21 to 7 (and an extended family now featuring 18 nieces and nephews).
And help set some other things right in the process.
“She brought Rob back to us,” Shelly said.
A ‘do-over button’
When she stops to think about it, Haven says “the biggest part of who I am is knowing who I was.”
Yet because she got to push a kind of cosmic “do-over button,” and because she knows her story, and because of some remarkable combination of nature and nurture, she doesn’t mourn that past and lives right here, right now. She considers herself “an American through and through” and says she has lived “the normal childhood.”
Haven Shepherd uses (and loves) prosthetic legs. A lot of her strength is also in her arms and shoulders, which she described as “windmills.”
She doesn’t complain about her legs amputated just below the knees, she says, because that’s all she’s ever known and she “wasn’t raised like I was disabled.” That’s just how it was in a home where Shelly says her kids always felt supported but never were coddled, either.
With that, they were all taught that whatever any of them might wish they had and perhaps lacked was less important than the unique gifts each possessed.
In Haven’s case, that includes a feeling that in some ways she is who she is not despite losing her legs but because of that.
And it certainly includes a magnetic personality and an uncanny empathy that shows up in such ways as helping comfort and inspire hope in a local family whose daughter lost her legs in an accident.
Raised in a family of athletes (and now also into CrossFit), it was inevitable she’d gravitate to sports and all the more so towards swimming: Back in Vietnam, the Shepherds witnessed her in the water, splashing around and beaming.
“She just has always been really drawn to the water, and she moved really well in the water,” Shelly said, noting that now it’s also a place where she can enjoy removing the heavy prosthetics and “just be free.”
Not that it’s always simple. On the way to becoming an elite swimmer through the Berzerkers swim club in Webb City and living what she calls the “ultimate Hannah Montana” double life, she sometimes feels pressure and at times wishes maybe her life wasn’t such an open book.
Orphaned and injured as a small child in her native Vietnam, Haven Shepherd has never let circumstances define outcomes in her life. Over the next two weeks, she’ll be in Tokyo to compete for the U.S. in the Paralympics.
he’s famous now, really, the subject of stories by national news outlets and the BBC and engaged in various endorsements and campaigns nd brand ambassadorships with such entities as Instagram, Tommy Hilfiger, Dove, Jolyn swimwear, Gymshark fitness apparel.
That all can bring a heavy sense of responsibility.
Just the same, it resonates when her mother says she wasn’t “born to live a small, quiet life.” She was created for something more, Haven knows. And she’ll tell you she was created to be just like she is, on a journey reminiscent of some other stories but very much rising into its own trajectory and the open sky ahead.
Vahe Gregorian
Sun, August 22, 2021, 5:00 AM
If “Soul Surfer” and “The Blind Side” had a child, Shelly Shepherd will tell you, it would be in the story of her seventh child, Haven, born in Quang Nam Province, Vietnam, with the fitting name of Phuong — a derivation of which translates as “phoenix.”
“Rising phoenix,” Shelly Shepherd said, “rising out of the fire.”
With a shattering parallel: She was 14 months old when her biological father attached bombs to himself and Haven’s birth mother, held their girl in between and ignited them.
In what the Shepherds initially were told was a family murder-suicide spurred by desperate poverty and shame over their child born out of wedlock with each parent married to others, the mother and father died immediately.
Somehow, their daughter was propelled 30 to 40 feet, her legs maimed, and then found in the flames outside the hut. And if you want to know something about the indomitable spirit that sustained her through such trauma and led her to love life, you can get a glimpse through her radiant demeanor and sense of humor.
“You know what Michael Jordan and I have in common?” Haven, now 18, said with her infectious laugh. “We were both airborne.”
If that sounds jarring, she quickly says, “Life is too good to be serious; I just know so many people who take life so seriously.”
The origin story has puzzles and gaps, including the mystery of why an older sister was in the hut but evidently excluded from the horrific act. Explosives experts, Shelly Shepherd said, would say no way the toddler could have survived between two bombs.
And years later, Shelly and her husband, Rob, were given some different information: that the birth mother also had been entirely a victim after discovering the father had another family and kicked him out, leading to him returning to kill her.
Still, all versions and possibilities of the story have the one universal element that really matters: miracle upon miracle upon miracle, Shelly Shepherd believes.
That’s what allowed Haven to live through the blasts … and through a surely harrowing ride on the back of a motorcycle through rugged jungle terrain to the nearest hospital in Da Nang … and to have her legs so expertly amputated there as to amaze doctors at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City … and to be right where the Shepherds needed her to be, a mere 8,510 miles away from home, at a crucial time in their own lives …
Haven Shepherd’s success athletically has an incredible amount of hard work behind it. Here, she works out in Joplin.
And now to represent the United States as a swimmer in the Tokyo Paralympic Games.
“Windmills, my arms are,” Haven said, smiling, a few weeks before leaving for Tokyo and her scheduled competitions in the 200-meter individual medley (Aug. 28) and 100-meter breaststroke (Sept. 1).
As for her prosthetic legs, she considers them the ultimate fashion accessory and says, “Just put that I L-O-V-E my legs.”
So when she hears someone say they were an accident of birth, she’ll think of how she was the accident of all accidents … and how it led her to the life she was meant to live all along.
Because sometimes everything can just look and feel different when you’re thankful for what you have instead of rueful over what you don’t, she believes — and her story validates.
Finding sanctuary, but also providing refuge
“Soul Surfer” is the autobiography made into a movie about Bethany Hamilton’s life as a surfer after losing her arm in a shark attack; “The Blind Side” was Michael Lewis’ book, which also became a movie, about football player Michael Oher and his adoptive parents.
And those themes converge in the tale of Haven, who found sanctuary in the Shepherds but also provided a certain sort of refuge herself.
“We rescued her,” said Shelly, a woman of Christian conviction and seemingly boundless generosity. “But in so many ways she rescued us, too.”
Shelly Shepherd, left, hugging adopted daughter Haven, says she and husband Rob “rescued her. But in so many ways she rescued us, too.”
Rob and Shelly already had four daughters and two sons, each a love story of their own. As was the relationship between the couple that goes back to their teens.
But in 2000, Terry Shepherd, Rob’s brother and co-owner of the family business, Mid-America Hardwoods and Heritage Oak Flooring, died in a ghastly truck accident after a company picnic.
Five years after their father, Gary, had died at age 59 suffering a heart attack, Rob was devastated.
“We really lost him for a while,” said Shelly, grief-stricken herself over the death of Terry, who also was the husband of her sister, Rhonda.
A year went by, and then another. But Shelly couldn’t seem to reach Rob and came to think, “This is him now. He’s here, but he’s not here.”
Meanwhile, in 2002, Shelly attended what she called a motivational talk about orphans suffering in other countries. She felt her heart pounding. The feeling became so urgent, she said, that it was almost an obsession.
As it happens, that was right around the time Haven was conceived half a world away.
At the mention of that as they spoke in their home the other week, Haven shrugged and called herself an “oopsie” baby.
Or was she?
“Exactly,” she said, smiling.
‘The light would come back in his eyes’
Rob was resistant to the idea.
But over time, he became persuaded to at least take a trip to Vietnam with Pam and Randy Cope, co-founders of the Touch A Life foundation that seeks to change the world one child at a time in the wake of the death of their oldest son, Jantsen, in 1999.
The Copes had sought to find a home for Haven in the United States, The Associated Press wrote, after her story had become well-known in Vietnam. They went with the aim of bringing her home to another family in Missouri and already had a name for her in this new life: Faith.
Moreover, even Shelly had not necessarily been inclined to adopt a child with disabilities.
But all of that abruptly changed.
Almost instantly, she said, the child was nuzzling up to Rob as he held her on a beach — a scene they have on video footage that might make a sensitive person mist up.
“Every time she would love on him,” Shelly said, “the light would come back in his eyes.”
Athletic and poised in several sports, Haven Shepherd has traveled the world competing for the United States.
To say nothing of how smitten Shelly was. By Day Three of the journey, with Haven wearing her sunglasses and giggling as she flipped her around, Shelly could feel something so powerful inside that she compared it to a sense of conception itself.
“This is my child,” she knew.
Only … she wasn’t. At least not immediately with the girl set to be adopted by the other family.
To Shelly, the attachment already was so profound that she found herself crying on the cold floor of her hotel, grieving a loss, thinking she might never be able to stop.
Instead, shortly after they returned, Pam Cope called Shelly to tell her that it wasn’t working out as smoothly as hoped with the other family for various reasons, including some complications with another child of about the same age in the house.
It was time for Haven to come home where she belonged, where she’d immediately also have loving siblings then ranging in age from 21 to 7 (and an extended family now featuring 18 nieces and nephews).
And help set some other things right in the process.
“She brought Rob back to us,” Shelly said.
A ‘do-over button’
When she stops to think about it, Haven says “the biggest part of who I am is knowing who I was.”
Yet because she got to push a kind of cosmic “do-over button,” and because she knows her story, and because of some remarkable combination of nature and nurture, she doesn’t mourn that past and lives right here, right now. She considers herself “an American through and through” and says she has lived “the normal childhood.”
Haven Shepherd uses (and loves) prosthetic legs. A lot of her strength is also in her arms and shoulders, which she described as “windmills.”
She doesn’t complain about her legs amputated just below the knees, she says, because that’s all she’s ever known and she “wasn’t raised like I was disabled.” That’s just how it was in a home where Shelly says her kids always felt supported but never were coddled, either.
With that, they were all taught that whatever any of them might wish they had and perhaps lacked was less important than the unique gifts each possessed.
In Haven’s case, that includes a feeling that in some ways she is who she is not despite losing her legs but because of that.
And it certainly includes a magnetic personality and an uncanny empathy that shows up in such ways as helping comfort and inspire hope in a local family whose daughter lost her legs in an accident.
Raised in a family of athletes (and now also into CrossFit), it was inevitable she’d gravitate to sports and all the more so towards swimming: Back in Vietnam, the Shepherds witnessed her in the water, splashing around and beaming.
“She just has always been really drawn to the water, and she moved really well in the water,” Shelly said, noting that now it’s also a place where she can enjoy removing the heavy prosthetics and “just be free.”
Not that it’s always simple. On the way to becoming an elite swimmer through the Berzerkers swim club in Webb City and living what she calls the “ultimate Hannah Montana” double life, she sometimes feels pressure and at times wishes maybe her life wasn’t such an open book.
Orphaned and injured as a small child in her native Vietnam, Haven Shepherd has never let circumstances define outcomes in her life. Over the next two weeks, she’ll be in Tokyo to compete for the U.S. in the Paralympics.
he’s famous now, really, the subject of stories by national news outlets and the BBC and engaged in various endorsements and campaigns nd brand ambassadorships with such entities as Instagram, Tommy Hilfiger, Dove, Jolyn swimwear, Gymshark fitness apparel.
That all can bring a heavy sense of responsibility.
Just the same, it resonates when her mother says she wasn’t “born to live a small, quiet life.” She was created for something more, Haven knows. And she’ll tell you she was created to be just like she is, on a journey reminiscent of some other stories but very much rising into its own trajectory and the open sky ahead.
