SFPD officer’s miraculous recovery after hit-and-run left him severely brain-damaged
By: Evan Sernoffsky, San Francisco Chronicle
SAN FRANCISCO — Even with a severe brain injury and no likely chance of returning to his earlier life as an aspiring lawyer, avid reader and outdoorsman, Elia Lewin-Tankel’s recovery has been miraculous, his friends and colleagues said.
The San Francisco police officer was on bicycle patrol when a fleeing motorist struck him in October 2017, causing a head injury so severe that responding paramedics believed he was dead. And after surgeons at San Francisco General Hospital removed a portion of his skull the size of a human hand, they braced his pregnant wife: The father-to-be might end up as little more than a pulse in human form.
But in the year and a half since the incident, Lewin-Tankel, now 34, has fought hard at a rehab center in Arizona and is up and out of bed. He no longer needs a network of tubes and wires to keep him alive. He started recognizing his wife, an English teacher at Mission High School. He can hold his 1-year-old son.
