BERLIN—Tynise Bowen, 36, of Berlin is a young mother who has experienced the nightmare nearly every parent fears—the horror of watching helplessly as their child is hurt or killed. For her, both occurred in tandem on Nov. 8, when she watched from her car as her son Tymeir Dennis, 16, was struck and killed, and her son Tyheim Bowen, who was turning 18, was severely injured, when they were both hit by an unmarked state police vehicle at the intersection of U.S. Route 113 and Bay Street in Berlin.
Still reeling from shock and the enormity of the aftermath, Bowen agreed to discuss the incidents that led up to the accident during an interview on Jan. 6. She said she has also retained legal counsel to find answers to the many unanswered questions that plague her.
Bowen acknowledged the overwhelming support her family has received from friends, family, and the Berlin community in the accident’s aftermath. She now has two other concerns besides fears of mounting bills and tending to the health needs of her surviving son Tyheim. She has listened to the discussions of and calls for a pedestrian-friendly crosswalk that was long overdue at the deadly intersection and agrees that the community needs it.
There is something she needed to get off her chest and clarifications she wanted to make and to respond to the multitude of inquiries from neighbors and friends.
“People think these kids were three or four years old,” Bowen said in an interview with Bayside Gazette. With full resolve, she stiffened and insisted, “That accident was not caused by children who did not look both ways before crossing the road, because they were not in the road.”
As if to make the point, a family member has placed a stuffed toy bear at the spot where the point of impact occurred and a floral roadside memorial at the spot where the fatal crash tossed Tymeir’s body, several yards away.
Her son Tyheim is present during the interview, but primarily as an observer. He is tall and quick to flash a broad smile. He answered the door with a new pair of crutches and opted to let his mom speak for the both of them. He seemed to be adjusting with a positive attitude, but goes silent at times and suddenly turns rapt attention to a hand-held electronic device when certain subjects, like his brother Tymeir, come up.
Bowen’s home is a modest and neat, subsidized apartment. Ironically it is located on Bay Street and overlooks Route 113.
Bowen works at the Dollar Tree store in West Ocean City. On Nov. 8, she had ended her shift at 2 p.m. and, with her work clothes still on, headed home. Tymeir had come over around 5 p.m. to play NBA Xbox 2K14 with his brother. They spent the afternoon playing and trash talking about the interfamily sports rivalry. The brothers were New Orleans Saints NFL fans and Los Angeles Lakers basketball fans. In football, mom was the lone Cowboys fan.
Correcting the date of Tyheim’s that was provided earlier by a family member, Bowen said Tyheim celebrated his 18th birthday not the Tuesday before the accident, but while recuperating from his injuries in the hospital on Nov. 12
In addition to her sons, Tynise has three daughters: Trinity, 9; Tamyzia, 10, and Tynajah, 12. She left with Trinity to go grocery shopping at the local Food Lion. It had turned dark by the time they were finished and making their way back home. As she pulled into the left turn lane on southbound U.S. Route 113, Tynise spotted Tymeir and Tyheim walking along Bay Street towards her, past the Uncle Willie’s parking lot. When they spotted her they both burst into sheepish grins—busted by mom’s radar again.
From that point the events seemed to become progressively pixilated in time before fading into a dark gray, for Bowen. She clearly remembered watching the brothers look each way and then exchange glances with each other as they crossed from the grassy lot in front of the Uncle Willie’s property towards the median. Instinct made her look as they approached. The closest set of headlights she saw were at a cutaway near the entrance to Stephen Decatur Park. Her attention returned to her sons.
What occurred in that slice of time is a seminal event for Bowen. She wanted to make clear, “they did nothing wrong and I would never have let them continue to cross if there was a car coming.”
As the brothers approached the median opposite of the guardrail where Bowen was waiting in the left lane for the light to turn green, she asked, “Where you two think you’re going?” Younger sister Trinity watched the exchange—perhaps with the schandenfreud siblings tend to show when they are not the target of an impending parental inquisition.
Bowen remembered seeing a large truck going northbound in the right lane passing behind the brothers as they reached the median. Meanwhile, they seemed to be conspiring to formulate a plausible excuse that would satisfy their mom’s question on their whereabouts. Seconds later, Tynise remembered hearing a loud “smack” sound followed by the soft squeal braking tires make when scraping against a grass or a road surface.
She remembered seeing a large SUV make impact with Tyheim. That horrible moment is now seared into her memory, she said. She never saw the driver as the vehicle flashed by and Tymeir had simply disappeared. She said she was unaware at the time the driver was a police officer in an unmarked vehicle.
Bowen remembered Trinity jumping out of the car from the passenger’s side and racing towards her brother. Bowen ordered her back in the car.
She also recalls quickly exiting the car herself and running to Tyheim, who was writhing on the ground with massive abdominal injuries. In her mind, both of his legs appeared to have been destroyed by the impact. Then she hears him call to her. He is alive and she dropped to her knees beside him.
He looked up at her and choked out, “Mom, I don’t think I’m going to make it.” Bowen tries to reassure him; she reminds him that she is there and tells him that things will be okay and to try to be strong.
But she did not feel strong, because she knew things were not okay. Tymeir was nowhere to be found and neither was the vehicle. She tried to maintain voice contact with Tyheim. Bowen said, “As long as I could hear him, I started looking for the second one.”
Leaving her car at the light caused a traffic backup as a line of cars formed directly behind her. A bedlam of screaming, slamming car doors and gathering onlookers ensued as the drivers and passengers began coming out of their vehicles as well, once they realized what had occurred.
Meanwhile, panic set in for Bowen as she desperately scanned the area for her youngest son. She screamed for him, or anyone who has seen him. She had temporarily forgotten about using the cell phone in her pocket to call 911 and is reminded of it only when she heard a fire siren go off in the distance. She started to run down the length of the median strip. “I was in so much shock I didn’t know what to do,” she said.
When Bowen finally located Tymeir, first responders were already on the scene and trying to help him. She remembered a female paramedic approaching her and reassuring her. “They are doing everything they can,” the paramedic told her and, according to Bowen, the paramedic pointed her out to a tall, thin, white male officer; she described the officer’s apparently aquiline features. “This is the mother,” she said she heard the paramedic say. According to Bowen, the officer’s response was “I can’t talk to her,” and walks off. Bowen said she was dismayed by the response, and wonders if he was the driver. “I’ll never forget his face,” which she seemed to want to lock into her memory.
Instead, she said it was Berlin Police Chief Arnold Downing, having come to the scene upon hearing the dispatch call, who had informed her Tymeir was transported to Atlantic General Hospital and Tyheim was being taken to Peninsula Regional Medical Center. She tells Downing her aunt, Carrie Bowen, had been called and was already in route from the neighborhood nearby and that they will go AGH first. When Bowen, her aunt and her companion Tranise Bailey arrived at the emergency room at AGH, “That’s where they broke the news to me and asked me to identify which one it was,” she said.
Still reeling from the procedures associated with identifying the body of her youngest son and coping with that loss in Berlin’s AGH, Bowen was then forced to turn her attention to her surviving son, Tyheim, in what had to be a surreal journey to Salisbury’s PRMC. She remembered arriving between 9:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. and being told by an attending provider around 12:30 a.m. there was no attending physician in the hospital’s shock trauma department who could help Tyheim, who had lost circulation in his legs, and that they were airlifting him to the University of Maryland Medical Center’s Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. Bowen, her aunt and her companion were left to make their way to Baltimore on their own. They got lost on the way, and when the three finally arrived Bowen remembered being told that the veins in Tyheim’s legs had collapsed and that the trauma team had been waiting for her signature before taking him in to surgery. His body had suffered massive injuries and if his right leg was not amputated she might lose him altogether. She agreed to make the decision to let them take his leg mid-calf and at 3:30 a.m. they went into surgery.
Bowen said that she wasn’t told immediately when Tyheim came out of surgery around 5 a.m. because the doctor did not know which waiting area they were in. A physician around 5:30 a.m. finally notified her, she said. She is still at a loss to know how the team couldn’t locate her in the same waiting room where she been holding vigil throughout the procedure.
Since the emergency surgery, however, Tyheim has needed a second procedure, to further amputate the same leg at mid-thigh and to reconstruct with a plate and pins the bones of his crushed pelvis. “He was in a lot of pain,” Bowen said, but she is grateful that her oldest son survived.
From that tragic moment Bowen has taken leave from her $250 a week job to attend to Tyheim during his two-week stay at the Shock Trauma Center and two subsequent weeks in rehabilitation at the HealthSouth Chesapeake Rehabilitation Hospital in Salisbury. She now faces bills for rent, car insurance, telephone and utilities, without that income. Her last paycheck paid for her car insurance premium, which fell behind in November. She expressed gratitude for a financial donation that allowed her to make the December premium payment.
Bowen said she has health insurance, but she now faces bills and appointment schedules from three doctors—appointments to two surgeons in Baltimore and a prosthetics specialist in Salisbury. She will soon be facing the costs of helping Tyheim adjust to his new physical needs. She is reluctant to use words like “disabled” and she has no intention of allowing him to use his injuries from the accident to forgo pursuing a career path and voices a short list of careers he can pursue, like computers or data entry. She mentioned that she had seen new “bionic” prosthetics on star athletes.
At the mention of athletics, Tyheim, who had been relatively silent except to answer the occasional question, suddenly perks up and mentions basketball. Mother and son are momentarily distracted in conversation about a basketball club in Salisbury that is totally comprised of disabled players.
Tyheim’s medical costs are not Bowen’s only concern. She has insurance, she said. But her telephone contract was cancelled for nonpayment and she has resorted to using a pre-paid cell phone for communication. She seemed worried about how she will pay the electric bill that heats her apartment in the drafty rear section of her complex, future car insurance premiums and the rent.
The child support Bowen was receiving for Tyheim ended when he turned 18. Tymeir was being raised by his dad, Quentin Dennis, a correctional officer. Bowen said, other than Tymeir, she and Dennis have no further connection to each other. They have each moved on with their lives. Dennis is now married with a family that had fully included Tymeir. The one thing they came together on was the attention and nurturing environment they were both determined to provide for their son, she indicated.
Bowen said the reason why she has decided to take legal action is because she has been unsatisfied with the lack of answers to her questions about the accident from the Maryland State Police authorities who are investigating the incident.
“I want justice for my boys,” she said, and she expressed concern that they will somehow be brushed aside as the passion of the moment subsides.
That cannot happen for her, as she said that no matter how much counseling she receives to help her cope, “I’ll never be right after this,” because the visions of that night keep coming back.
Bowen said, “I love all of my children.” She then began choking back tears and finally breaks down and sobs into a tissue, “But if I could have taken that blow I would have done that.”
Still reeling from shock and the enormity of the aftermath, Bowen agreed to discuss the incidents that led up to the accident during an interview on Jan. 6. She said she has also retained legal counsel to find answers to the many unanswered questions that plague her.
Bowen acknowledged the overwhelming support her family has received from friends, family, and the Berlin community in the accident’s aftermath. She now has two other concerns besides fears of mounting bills and tending to the health needs of her surviving son Tyheim. She has listened to the discussions of and calls for a pedestrian-friendly crosswalk that was long overdue at the deadly intersection and agrees that the community needs it.
There is something she needed to get off her chest and clarifications she wanted to make and to respond to the multitude of inquiries from neighbors and friends.
“People think these kids were three or four years old,” Bowen said in an interview with Bayside Gazette. With full resolve, she stiffened and insisted, “That accident was not caused by children who did not look both ways before crossing the road, because they were not in the road.”
As if to make the point, a family member has placed a stuffed toy bear at the spot where the point of impact occurred and a floral roadside memorial at the spot where the fatal crash tossed Tymeir’s body, several yards away.
Her son Tyheim is present during the interview, but primarily as an observer. He is tall and quick to flash a broad smile. He answered the door with a new pair of crutches and opted to let his mom speak for the both of them. He seemed to be adjusting with a positive attitude, but goes silent at times and suddenly turns rapt attention to a hand-held electronic device when certain subjects, like his brother Tymeir, come up.
Bowen’s home is a modest and neat, subsidized apartment. Ironically it is located on Bay Street and overlooks Route 113.
Bowen works at the Dollar Tree store in West Ocean City. On Nov. 8, she had ended her shift at 2 p.m. and, with her work clothes still on, headed home. Tymeir had come over around 5 p.m. to play NBA Xbox 2K14 with his brother. They spent the afternoon playing and trash talking about the interfamily sports rivalry. The brothers were New Orleans Saints NFL fans and Los Angeles Lakers basketball fans. In football, mom was the lone Cowboys fan.
Correcting the date of Tyheim’s that was provided earlier by a family member, Bowen said Tyheim celebrated his 18th birthday not the Tuesday before the accident, but while recuperating from his injuries in the hospital on Nov. 12
In addition to her sons, Tynise has three daughters: Trinity, 9; Tamyzia, 10, and Tynajah, 12. She left with Trinity to go grocery shopping at the local Food Lion. It had turned dark by the time they were finished and making their way back home. As she pulled into the left turn lane on southbound U.S. Route 113, Tynise spotted Tymeir and Tyheim walking along Bay Street towards her, past the Uncle Willie’s parking lot. When they spotted her they both burst into sheepish grins—busted by mom’s radar again.
From that point the events seemed to become progressively pixilated in time before fading into a dark gray, for Bowen. She clearly remembered watching the brothers look each way and then exchange glances with each other as they crossed from the grassy lot in front of the Uncle Willie’s property towards the median. Instinct made her look as they approached. The closest set of headlights she saw were at a cutaway near the entrance to Stephen Decatur Park. Her attention returned to her sons.
What occurred in that slice of time is a seminal event for Bowen. She wanted to make clear, “they did nothing wrong and I would never have let them continue to cross if there was a car coming.”
As the brothers approached the median opposite of the guardrail where Bowen was waiting in the left lane for the light to turn green, she asked, “Where you two think you’re going?” Younger sister Trinity watched the exchange—perhaps with the schandenfreud siblings tend to show when they are not the target of an impending parental inquisition.
Bowen remembered seeing a large truck going northbound in the right lane passing behind the brothers as they reached the median. Meanwhile, they seemed to be conspiring to formulate a plausible excuse that would satisfy their mom’s question on their whereabouts. Seconds later, Tynise remembered hearing a loud “smack” sound followed by the soft squeal braking tires make when scraping against a grass or a road surface.
She remembered seeing a large SUV make impact with Tyheim. That horrible moment is now seared into her memory, she said. She never saw the driver as the vehicle flashed by and Tymeir had simply disappeared. She said she was unaware at the time the driver was a police officer in an unmarked vehicle.
Bowen remembered Trinity jumping out of the car from the passenger’s side and racing towards her brother. Bowen ordered her back in the car.
She also recalls quickly exiting the car herself and running to Tyheim, who was writhing on the ground with massive abdominal injuries. In her mind, both of his legs appeared to have been destroyed by the impact. Then she hears him call to her. He is alive and she dropped to her knees beside him.
He looked up at her and choked out, “Mom, I don’t think I’m going to make it.” Bowen tries to reassure him; she reminds him that she is there and tells him that things will be okay and to try to be strong.
But she did not feel strong, because she knew things were not okay. Tymeir was nowhere to be found and neither was the vehicle. She tried to maintain voice contact with Tyheim. Bowen said, “As long as I could hear him, I started looking for the second one.”
Leaving her car at the light caused a traffic backup as a line of cars formed directly behind her. A bedlam of screaming, slamming car doors and gathering onlookers ensued as the drivers and passengers began coming out of their vehicles as well, once they realized what had occurred.
Meanwhile, panic set in for Bowen as she desperately scanned the area for her youngest son. She screamed for him, or anyone who has seen him. She had temporarily forgotten about using the cell phone in her pocket to call 911 and is reminded of it only when she heard a fire siren go off in the distance. She started to run down the length of the median strip. “I was in so much shock I didn’t know what to do,” she said.
When Bowen finally located Tymeir, first responders were already on the scene and trying to help him. She remembered a female paramedic approaching her and reassuring her. “They are doing everything they can,” the paramedic told her and, according to Bowen, the paramedic pointed her out to a tall, thin, white male officer; she described the officer’s apparently aquiline features. “This is the mother,” she said she heard the paramedic say. According to Bowen, the officer’s response was “I can’t talk to her,” and walks off. Bowen said she was dismayed by the response, and wonders if he was the driver. “I’ll never forget his face,” which she seemed to want to lock into her memory.
Instead, she said it was Berlin Police Chief Arnold Downing, having come to the scene upon hearing the dispatch call, who had informed her Tymeir was transported to Atlantic General Hospital and Tyheim was being taken to Peninsula Regional Medical Center. She tells Downing her aunt, Carrie Bowen, had been called and was already in route from the neighborhood nearby and that they will go AGH first. When Bowen, her aunt and her companion Tranise Bailey arrived at the emergency room at AGH, “That’s where they broke the news to me and asked me to identify which one it was,” she said.
Still reeling from the procedures associated with identifying the body of her youngest son and coping with that loss in Berlin’s AGH, Bowen was then forced to turn her attention to her surviving son, Tyheim, in what had to be a surreal journey to Salisbury’s PRMC. She remembered arriving between 9:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. and being told by an attending provider around 12:30 a.m. there was no attending physician in the hospital’s shock trauma department who could help Tyheim, who had lost circulation in his legs, and that they were airlifting him to the University of Maryland Medical Center’s Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. Bowen, her aunt and her companion were left to make their way to Baltimore on their own. They got lost on the way, and when the three finally arrived Bowen remembered being told that the veins in Tyheim’s legs had collapsed and that the trauma team had been waiting for her signature before taking him in to surgery. His body had suffered massive injuries and if his right leg was not amputated she might lose him altogether. She agreed to make the decision to let them take his leg mid-calf and at 3:30 a.m. they went into surgery.
Bowen said that she wasn’t told immediately when Tyheim came out of surgery around 5 a.m. because the doctor did not know which waiting area they were in. A physician around 5:30 a.m. finally notified her, she said. She is still at a loss to know how the team couldn’t locate her in the same waiting room where she been holding vigil throughout the procedure.
Since the emergency surgery, however, Tyheim has needed a second procedure, to further amputate the same leg at mid-thigh and to reconstruct with a plate and pins the bones of his crushed pelvis. “He was in a lot of pain,” Bowen said, but she is grateful that her oldest son survived.
From that tragic moment Bowen has taken leave from her $250 a week job to attend to Tyheim during his two-week stay at the Shock Trauma Center and two subsequent weeks in rehabilitation at the HealthSouth Chesapeake Rehabilitation Hospital in Salisbury. She now faces bills for rent, car insurance, telephone and utilities, without that income. Her last paycheck paid for her car insurance premium, which fell behind in November. She expressed gratitude for a financial donation that allowed her to make the December premium payment.
Bowen said she has health insurance, but she now faces bills and appointment schedules from three doctors—appointments to two surgeons in Baltimore and a prosthetics specialist in Salisbury. She will soon be facing the costs of helping Tyheim adjust to his new physical needs. She is reluctant to use words like “disabled” and she has no intention of allowing him to use his injuries from the accident to forgo pursuing a career path and voices a short list of careers he can pursue, like computers or data entry. She mentioned that she had seen new “bionic” prosthetics on star athletes.
At the mention of athletics, Tyheim, who had been relatively silent except to answer the occasional question, suddenly perks up and mentions basketball. Mother and son are momentarily distracted in conversation about a basketball club in Salisbury that is totally comprised of disabled players.
Tyheim’s medical costs are not Bowen’s only concern. She has insurance, she said. But her telephone contract was cancelled for nonpayment and she has resorted to using a pre-paid cell phone for communication. She seemed worried about how she will pay the electric bill that heats her apartment in the drafty rear section of her complex, future car insurance premiums and the rent.
The child support Bowen was receiving for Tyheim ended when he turned 18. Tymeir was being raised by his dad, Quentin Dennis, a correctional officer. Bowen said, other than Tymeir, she and Dennis have no further connection to each other. They have each moved on with their lives. Dennis is now married with a family that had fully included Tymeir. The one thing they came together on was the attention and nurturing environment they were both determined to provide for their son, she indicated.
Bowen said the reason why she has decided to take legal action is because she has been unsatisfied with the lack of answers to her questions about the accident from the Maryland State Police authorities who are investigating the incident.
“I want justice for my boys,” she said, and she expressed concern that they will somehow be brushed aside as the passion of the moment subsides.
That cannot happen for her, as she said that no matter how much counseling she receives to help her cope, “I’ll never be right after this,” because the visions of that night keep coming back.
Bowen said, “I love all of my children.” She then began choking back tears and finally breaks down and sobs into a tissue, “But if I could have taken that blow I would have done that.”
Next week: Interview with a grieving father.