Published March 23, 2015
A Georgia Tech student badly hurt when he fell out of bed in his fraternity house in January is still unable to talk or walk, and a GoFundMe page has been set up to help the family with the expensive medical bills.
Clark Jacobs, a 20-year-old mechanical engineering major from Acworth, fell out of his bed Jan. 10 while he slept and suffered a severe head injury that initially went undiagnosed. Before his injury, he had a 3.9 GPA at Tech.
“We thought he had the flu or meningitis because he did not look like someone who had a brain injury at first,” his father, Ron Jacobs, told Channel 2 Action News. “He was completely cognizant, conversational.”
Ron Jacobs said that at first, his son didn’t realize he had fallen out of bed.
“He just climbed back into bed while sleeping,” Ron Jacobs said.
But the Kell High School graduate’s condition quickly worsened.
“We treated him [at home] for less than a day and decided to take him to the hospital because with stiff neck, we were afraid it might be meningitis,” his mother, Mariellen Jacobs, told Channel 2.
A CT scan revealed Clark Jacobs had a fractured skull.
“He ended up having a blood clot,” Mariellen Jacobs said. “Unfortunately, it led to a bleed in his brain and [doctors] had to do emergency surgery to save his life.”
Clark Jacobs is recovering at the Shepherd Center. The family has insurance, but there are some services the insurance won’t cover. That is why the GoFundMe page was created.
Mariellen Jacobs told Channel 2 that her son fell onto a linoleum floor from a very tall “loft” bed that had recently been installed in all of the fraternity house bedrooms. Since the accident, guardrails have been added to the beds, according to Channel 2.
