The Southern Cross | November 2024

The parents of a young boy who was the victim of a hammer-throwing accident have spoken publicly for the first time of their anguish as they watched him fight for his life, and their gratitude for the groundswell of prayers they firmly believe helped save him.

When Christian Brothers College Year 7 student Javale Morato was rushed to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital on September 5 with a traumatic brain injury, doctors told the family to expect the worst.

A few hours earlier, his mum Teresa and four-year-old sister Jeorgianna had arrived at St Albans Reserve, Clearview, to pick him up from athletics training and take him to his martial arts class. From the car, Teresa watched Javale have a drink of water and then throw the javelin before she turned to the back seat to unbuckle her daughter’s seatbelt.

By the time she turned back, there was a group of students and teachers gathered around a child lying on the ground. Teresa scanned the field for her son.

“I couldn’t find him anywhere so my heart begins to race, and I have to go and see,” she said as she relived the harrowing moment.

“That’s when I received a call on my phone and it was from the school, so I knew. I said ‘I saw, I’m here’.”

She ran onto the field and was told Javale had been hit by a ball.

“Some firemen came and put a tarpaulin around him,” Teresa said, unable to stop the tears.

“In my mind, if they put the tent up it would mean the worst, so I kept telling them to move away from my son.”

A woman came and tried to calm her down, saying ‘he’s fine’. But she knew he wasn’t fine. Her fears were confirmed when the paramedics turned him over and she saw that his face was “all black” from a lack of oxygen.

She shouted to Javale, “don’t go, you come back, you come back” as the paramedics performed CPR and put a needle in him, then transferred him to the ambulance.

The medical team wouldn’t let Teresa travel in the ambulance and a friend who had been in the vicinity was about to drive her to the hospital when Javale was brought back out and a doctor intubated him on the field. This gave the distraught Teresa a tiny glimmer of hope.

“Javale loves The Good Doctor (TV show) and from that I had this idea if a person is very critical, they need to intervene quickly, so I thought thank God they’re not going to wait until he gets to hospital,” she said.

Meanwhile, her husband Jason, a ‘fly in/fly out’ worker, had just knocked off when he received a phone call from a friend which he thought was a bit unusual. His initial dread was that something had happened to Teresa or Jeorgianna, not his active, sports-loving son.

“I started to panic, from then on I was trying to fly back but because I was in a remote area I couldn’t fly,” he said.

Jason’s supervisor and even the hospital social worker tried unsuccessfully to arrange a flight and he was forced to spend an agonising night in his room. Two close colleagues came to his room and “prayed and wept” with him.

Finally reaching Adelaide the next afternoon, he went straight to the hospital.

“When I saw my son I couldn’t believe what had happened to him,” Jason said.

“Every morning we would exchange messages, I’d tell him to take care, be safe, especially because he’s taking the bus to school now…and he’d say ‘okay, I love you’.

“It’s really unexplainable, what it was like to see him. I thought this couldn’t happen to my son because he is really active; this kind of freak accident, you never dream of this happening to your son.”

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