Fundraiser For Kaleb Pfleger

As a lot of you know, our police family has been dealing with some heavy stuff over the last few weeks.

On February 4th, Officer Jeb Cooper’s wife and kids were skiing at Killington in Vermont. They started their first run of the day. Not far from the gondola, their son Kaleb fell coming out of a shortcut through the woods. He fell on his front/side and never put his arms out, which didn’t make sense at the time. Ski patrol got him down off the mountain and an ambulance was waiting to take him to the local hospital. Kaleb had a seizure in the ambulance and when they got to the hospital, they sedated him and did a CT scan. The scan revealed no broken bones and all his vertebrates looked good. There was, however, bleeding on his brain. They life flighted him to Albany, NY to a trauma center. He was immediately heavily sedated and put on meds to stabilize him and try to keep the pressure down in his head. The next day they found a ruptured aneurysm in the lower back of his head and placed a coil in to fix it. The neurologists believe it’s very possible that Kaleb had an unknown aneurysm, presumably from previous accidents, and it ruptured causing him to fall. The ruptured aneurysm did cause a stroke in his cerebellum.

Over the next week or two there was many ups and downs - from being unable to stabilize the pressure in his head, to fever, blood clots, and infections. Kaleb’s case was unusual because he had two different zones of pressure and damage going on, so the surgeon’s hands were tied, and they were unable to do surgery to relieve the pressure. The best they could do was heavily sedate him to keep him still, give him meds and wait.

We are still waiting for him to wake up, he is completely weaned off the barbiturates at this point. The doctors say it takes a long time for them to completely get out of your system… so we wait. We do know it will be a long, long recovery and we still don’t know what “recovery” will even look like; the doctors don’t even know. We are hopeful that his 18-year-old body and brain will do crazy amazing things! He does move all of his extremities and over the week that has gotten more frequent and stronger.

Officer Cooper & his family would like to thank everyone who has reached out in any way, they are truly blessed to have such an overwhelming amount of support. Until this, they have never gone through anything this hard. They have come to realized how many friends, family, and community members are here to be supportive and they truly cherish it.

We are all staying positive, hopeful, and praying for the best possible outcome for Kaleb.