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ESPN THE MAGAZINE / JULY 2019
Hannah Smith was a 16-year-old high school basketball player in rural Lebanon, Oregon, when she heard her father scream. She was outside with her younger sister, who was 14 at the time, walking the dogs. The date was April 1, 2013.
Given the date, her first thought was that this was a joke. The sisters walked on. Then there was another scream, desperate, real. They dropped the leashes and ran. Their father was probably 500 feet away, on the other side of a utility shed and workshop, in the vegetable garden portion of their 5-acre property, which sat "in the middle of nowhere." Though not a working farm, the Smith homestead had cows, pigs, chickens, sheds and various large machines for outdoor labor. Their father, Jeff Smith, a millwright at a local factory, particularly enjoyed performing tasks while perched atop his classic 1949 fire-engine-red Ferguson TO-20, an agricultural tractor with enormous rear tires and an exposed engine block, like what's used for hayrides.
On this day, Jeff had been using the rig to pull a tree stump out of the ground. When the Smith girls rounded the corner of the shed, they saw their father's legs sprawling from under the engine block of the Ferguson. Somehow the machine had turned upside down. It did not have a roll cage. Its motor was still running. The weight of the engine block lay across him. The steering wheel pinned his chest to the ground. According to specs listed on TractorData.com, a fully fueled 1949 Ferguson TO-20 weighs approximately 1.4 tons.….