Double Nightmare as Farmer Twice Miraculously Escapes Death

Here’s to the mettle and mouthful-of-rocks account of John Butler, a farmer twice pushed to the “edge of dying.”

John Butler stood before the muzzle of a loaded cannon pointed directly at his torso. He was caught in the gray of an unguarded moment between life and death, positioned in profile 8’ from the fan-end of a propane-fueled grain dryer set to explode.

As if on cue, the dryer emitted a high-pitched, metallic squeal and caused Butler’s neck to pivot, his face drawn to the noise, as a 3’-diameter fan and its accompanying shield hurtled out of the machine. In the same frozen flash of a millisecond when a batter picks out the seams of an incoming fastball, Butler eyed two pieces of giant shrapnel rocketing through the air, just before the pair tore into his body. The resulting mangled mess crumpled on a concrete slab outside the barn was the body of a dead man. Almost.

Play it again 100 times and Butler dies on each rewind, but on this freak occasion, the lifelong grain farmer shattered the odds. And whether piling on misery or adding to a bizarre survival saga, three years later Butler endured a second traumatic injury in a surreal vehicular mash-up, yet once again emerge and return to farming. Two grim accidents, two sets of outrageously strange circumstances, and one stalwart farmer grateful for another chance at life. Here’s to the resilience of John Butler and his mouthful-of-rocks account.

All Hell Broke Loose

Just outside the Finger Lakes region, in central New York, Butler, 64, and his brother-in-law, Paul Ryan, grow corn, hay, soybeans and wheat on Cayuga County farmland divided by flats, rolling knobs, and steep hills. Recently retired, Butler once split time away from the rows as a utility company technician working on natural gas regulator stations.

On most October days on the farm, Butler combines in the fields and Ryan dries grain, or vice-versa. A simplified division of labor: one man in the rows and one man at the barn, bins, and shop. Yet, Sunday, Oct. 28, 2012, was an outlier, markedly distinct from a typical harvest day, draped in a curtain of fog and the steady drizzle of a front dipping into the 40s.

Surrendering to the cold and wet, Butler canned combining hopes at approximately 10 a.m., joining Ryan around the shop and pole barn to help dry grain. Several bins butted against the side of the barn, and ran nearly adjacent to a covered area outside the rear of the building, where the grain dryer sat on a concrete pad. Inside the roughly 12’-long dryer, a load of corn was bathing in heated air and losing miniscule bits of moisture by the minute.

Corn harvest — “Hand me that damn phone if you can’t get through,” said Butler, fully conscious despite his upper body cut open stem to stern. “I’ll dial the sunuvabitch myself.” (Photo by Chris Bennett)

Inexplicably, the dryer stopped without warning. Ryan walked to the control panel, punched the restart button, and watched as the dryer roared back to life, with no further signs of disruption. Concerns dismissed, Ryan walked out of the barn structure as the slightly dubious Butler, dressed in a sweatshirt and burnt-orange Carhartt bib overalls, remained standing beside the drying device to watch it operate. Breath catching frost in the morning chill, he stared at the machine for at least several minutes, and when patience and curiosity ran short, gave up the vigil and began walking away from the tail-end of the dryer, toward the barn’s rear entrance. On Butler’s eighth step, all hell broke loose.

Any Other Sunday

“I saw it. I saw the fan coming right at me.”

“I was walking back into the barn and heard this funny bang,” Butler recalls, “like a metallic breaking noise, and I stopped in my tracks, sideways from the dryer, and my face turned just as the fan blade shot out.”

The shield and aluminum fan both hit Butler on his left side, tossing him backwards 5’ through the air and slamming him to the concrete floor. Sprawled on his back, unable to move, Butler was shell-shocked, but conscious: “I couldn’t see anything on my body or move, except that I could look down and see what used to be my left hand. I didn’t know about living or dying right then, but I knew for sure my hand was gone.”

Mercifully, Butler didn’t realize the mangled hand was of diminished concern compared to the rest of his wounds. In fact, Butler’s injuries were horrific. His lower left arm was shredded and his torso was cut stem to stern on the left side—exposing Butler’s lung, bookmarked by an extremely deep gouge on his hip, and a long gash on his head.

“I was sorta tore open to the point where you could see my insides, and my left hip was ripped up awful, and I must have taken a tremendous knock to the head and face area,” Butler describes. “There was nothing I could do except yell for Paul—and hope he was still around.”

On any other Sunday, by definition of their farm roles, Butler would have been on the opposite end of the farm from Ryan. Yet, on Oct. 28, 2012, Ryan was within shouting distance, and heard the cries of his brother-in-law. “I wouldn’t be here today if nobody had been around, and I thank God for Paul,” Butler says with conviction. “I’m almost always alone on the farm, but on that day, it was too wet to combine. Otherwise, somebody would have eventually found me dead on the floor.”

Corn flow — “I’ll tell anyone: When tough things happen, you stay strong, you stay together, and you will get through it,” says Alice Butler. (Photo by Chris Bennett)

Rounding the corner of the barn, Ryan spotted flames in the dryer, and initially assumed Butler’s shouts were essentially a fire alarm. (The false fire was generated by residual flames from the gas just before the regulators kicked in and shut down the flow.) At the sight of Butler dying on the ground, Ryan pulled his cell and began punching numbers, fumbling for a decent signal.

Butler, still fully conscious, was full of fight. “Hand me that damn phone if you can’t get through. I’ll dial the sunuvabitch myself.”

In The Crosshairs

Twenty minutes later, the local fire department, followed by an ambulance crew, arrived on the scene to find Butler talking, and in relatively little pain. “Everything was numb, and I honestly couldn’t feel much else. I kept telling the paramedics not to let me bleed to death, but the crazy thing was, I was hardly bleeding anyway.”

Butler’s ravaged left arm, and the other wounds along his hip, side and head, had released a minimal amount of blood. “Hardly none,” he says. “Later on, the doctors explained my body had acted like a perfect machine and shut down to save me. The muscles tightened and constricted the vessels to keep me from bleeding to death.”

Due to heavy fog blanketing the area, helicopter transport—although needed—was out of the question. Instead, Butler was shuttled into the ambulance for a one-hour ride to Syracuse and the Upstate University Hospital’s trauma center, where a phalanx of doctors waited as he was wheeled through the doors.

Despite superb medical care, the die was cast when the fan spun from the dryer: Butler’s left arm was a loss. “The doctors gave me the choice of a mangled arm I could never use or amputation. I already knew it was gone anyway. They cut it off at the elbow and that was the best things could be.”

Even with the loss of the arm, and the initial ragged appearance of Butler’s body, doctors were surprised to find preservation of his internal organs and bones, he notes. “They couldn’t believe my insides were good. I was laid open with my lung visible and big holes all over my body, but there were no broken bones and my major organs weren’t damaged much.”

After multiple surgeries and two weeks in hospital recovery, Butler returned home. The precise causal factors leading to Butler’s injuries were never explained. The dryer malfunction stemmed from separation of the fan hub, but beyond that basic deduction, the mechanical failure was never determined.

After his immediate recovery, Butler was fitted for a prosthetic arm in February, and his attitude remained the same from the day he left the hospital until the day he returned to farm work: “I’ll have my ups and downs, but I’ll be back. Just need a little time.”

Most importantly, he emphasizes, was the care and support of his wife, Alice, a trained nurse, who never left his side during the entire ordeal. “She took the best care of me. The best. She was all I needed.”

“I knew John would get better,” Alice explains. “I was not going to let him dwell on anything but getting through this together. I knew we had to deal with it and move on, and that’s exactly what we did.”

One year after the accident, Butler resumed farm work and returned to the utility company. He was sanguine and upbeat, ready to take the reins just prior to retirement, but irony upon irony, the New York farmer was only a handful of years from a far more surreal accident. A Florida vacation, a bingo night, a freaked-out nonagenarian, and a runaway golf cart were about to converge in a convoluted near-death scenario, with Butler dead-center in the crosshairs.

What Are The Odds?

In 2015, Butler retired from utility work and bought a house in Lake Placid, Fla. Escaping the cutting, late-January cold of Cayuga County, Butler and Alice high-tailed it to the Sunshine State, intent on riding out the rest of the New York winter. Ten days after setting foot in Lake Placid, on Feb. 1, they spent a late-afternoon at a local bingo hall and stretched play until 7 p.m., and then began walking to their home several hundred yards away, in tandem with another married couple, on a roadside shoulder that rubbed against an embankment. It was a foursome trading conversation on a comfortable stroll: Butler, roadside, and Alice in the front, just ahead of the other couple.

Without a visible or audible warning, Butler was struck blindly from behind, slammed face-down, and pinned to the blacktop. “The impact was so fast and silent that I was crushed into the road and had no idea where I was, or what was on top of me,” he remembers.

“I heard nothing,” Alice concurs. “It was a blur. We were talking and laughing, and the next thing I knew John was underneath the cart.”

The accident was uncanny. A 90-plus-year-old man, driving an electric golf cart, rocketed over the embankment at full-throttle, continued down the hill gaining speed, and struck the foursome from behind—silent and nearly deadly. The cart first struck and scattered the rear couple like bowling pins, then careened past Alice, and finally smashed into Butler, entirely running over his body.

Wedged under the cart, Butler was gasping, unable to breathe, and unlike the grain dryer accident three years earlier, he felt excruciating pain—in waves of spasms. A punctured lung, broken nose, countless lacerations, and eight broken ribs that might aptly be described as crushed: 20 separate breaks divided between the eight ribs. “It hurt like hell. I could hear people yelling to get the cart off of me, and I was underneath, still not having a clue how I got there.”

After intensive care and nine days in the hospital, Butler went home in an ambulance, unable to move for several months. By spring, he was finally able to walk. Yet, far more than physical injury, the second accident did heavy damage to Butler’s psyche. “Mentally, I was discouraged. What are the odds? The second accident was prolonged, intense pain that lasted for months and it wore on me. But just like the first time, Alice kept me going. She was my rock.”

“Not again,” Alice echoes. “What were the statistics and odds for a repeat accident like this? But it didn’t matter and we had to face it. I’ll tell anyone: When tough things happen, you stay strong, you stay together, and you will get through it.”

Forever Grateful

As of 2021, Butler’s faulty grain dryer lies on the backside of his property—gathering weeds. Out of sight, out of mind.

John Butler: Farmer Survivor — “The truth is I’m the lucky one and I don’t take it for granted…I should have been gone in an instant—twice,” says John Butler. (Photo courtesy of John Butler)

Eight years after losing his arm, Butler can be found in his fields, working in full health, although mechanic work (changing hoses and power shafts) is often a puzzle. Six years after a golf cart battering, Butler keeps an eye out for the unexpected, but isn’t consumed by what he cannot control. He harbors no fear or self-pity—just overwhelming gratitude for second and third chances at life.

“The truth is I’m the lucky one and I don’t take it for granted. I thank God every morning for each day I’m still here. I should have been gone in an instant—twice. I see other farmers and utility workers that have gotten hurt so much worse, and that’s part of why I’m so grateful. I see military vets missing arms and legs, and I can’t imagine what they go through. God kept me around to do something. I was watched over.”

The emotional pain of traumatic injury, he adds, is ultimately only truly understood by its victims, and although the body heals, the worst scars remain hidden. “Somebody else, and it may be another farmer next time, is going to survive a terrible accident and have their life turned upside down. Don’t give up, and don’t be so proud that you won’t let people help you,” Butler concludes.

“I’ll be ready for the rest of my life to help anybody that’s got hurt and sometimes that just means letting a hurt person talk to someone else who knows the pain—someone else who’s come back from the edge of dying.”

To read more stories from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com — 662-592-1106), see:

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.

Bagging the Tomato King: The Insane Hunt for Agriculture’s Wildest Con Man

How a Texas Farmer Killed Agriculture’s Debt Dragon

While America Slept, China Stole the Farm

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

The Arrowhead whisperer: Stunning Indian Artifact Collection Found on Farmland

Where's the Beef: Con Artist Turns Texas Cattle Industry Into $100M Playground

Fleecing the Farm: How a Fake Crop Fueled a Bizarre $25 Million Ag Scam

Skeleton In the Walls: Mysterious Arkansas Farmhouse Hides Civil War History

US Farming Loses the King of Combines