Crashed biker out of danger

An Albany man has made a miraculous recovery after a Christmas Eve crash that left him fighting for his life and his sons without their father on Christmas morning. Twenty-five-year-old Shaun Hunter left his home late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve to go for a motorbike ride around the nearby bush. His friends and his partner’s family were sitting in front of their Lockyer home having a few drinks and can remember hearing the revs of his bike in the distance. They raised the alarm with Mr Hunter’s partner, Carly Pateman-Baker, after the revs fell silent. “His friends started getting paranoid that something had happened and so I started getting stressed out,” Ms Pateman-Baker said. She called the police after Mr Hunter did not return home later that evening, but they had nothing to report. “Just after I had put my kids to bed I went out to the front of the house and my friends ran up to me saying the police were here,” she said. “I went to talk to them and they asked for a photo of Shaun so they would know who to look out for. “They said that someone had been presented to the hospital after crashing their motorbike into a pole. Hearing that broke me — I just lost it. I knew it was him straight away.” Mr Hunter suffered a serious head injury causing bleeding on his brain and pressure in his head. He also broke his jaw, fractured one of his eye sockets and had a large cut on the right side of his forehead. After being taken to the Albany Health Campus, he was flown to Perth by the Royal Flying Doctor Service, where he remained in a critical condition for more than a week. Ms Pateman-Baker said at first she was not sure if her partner would pull through. The holiday period was extremely hard for her and their four and five-year-old sons. “The hardest part, aside from finding out that Shaun was in a crash, was going home to our kids and still trying to do Christmas for them,” she said. “On Christmas morning, before they opened their presents, I told them what happened to their dad and why he wasn’t there. “Our youngest didn’t really say anything, but our oldest, he had a lot of questions about what happened and had a lot of confusion. “I guess he understood for most part that Dad got hurt but I told him he was going to be OK.” Ms Pateman-Baker said the doctors were not sure how much longer Mr Hunter would have to remain in hospital, but the worst was over. She thanked all the staff at the hospital for being so accommodating towards Mr Hunter and their family.