Ben Harvey: Donations help get child burns victim Robbie Garret back behind the wheel

News reporters see people at their worst more than their best. The criminal after being arrested or the victim going into hospital. The politician sacked for the affair. The parents of the teenager in the car crash. News, by its nature, is often negative. So, it is a pleasure to write about something that shows people at their best. Have a look at the bloke in the middle of the picture above and you’ll see a smile that’ll make your day. The owner of the grin is Robbie Garrett. He’s happy because he’s just about to drive home in the shiny red car that’s behind him. Robbie, some of you may recall, was the star of this column a couple of months ago. I wrote then about how he needed a car because he was spending half his life waiting for buses to take him to hospital. As you can see from his scars, Robbie has been through a bit of an ordeal. It started on the morning of January 23, 1992, when he was playing with matches on his bed. His little hands fumbled the first two strikes but the third caught. The bright flame startled the four-year-old and he threw it behind him. Fire engulfed the bed and when Robbie’s father made it into the room he was confronted with a scene that would make even the most devout person question God’s plan — a tiny, charred wreck of body shaking with sobs. Fast forward 32 years and God knows how many operations and Robbie is married and working on getting his heavy rig driving licence. He has been travelling pretty well (surgery appears to have put paid to a recent cancer diagnosis) but not having a car was a real problem, so I put out a call to readers of this column. I woke the next day to find my inbox full of donation pledges. Amongst the messages of goodwill was one from career Good Samaritan Trevor Knuckey, who put me in touch with Phil Preedy at Canning Vale Toyota. Phil, who is the operations manager and clearly a sucker for a hard-luck story, had a Toyota Yaris in the yard he could put up for a cut-throat $7500. We had our fundraising target. Early donors sent money directly to Canning Vale Toyota while others contributed to the hastily lodged Get Robbie Back on the Road GoFundMe page. While the tally was growing Phil was giving the car the automotive equivalent of a colonoscopy, endoscopy, X-ray, CT scan, MRI and complete blood transfusion. After that the Yaris was sent to Gino Macri, who carefully re-sprayed the body to ensure a shade of red that guaranteed Robbie extra speed. Gino’s worked his entire adult life at Macri Spray Painters in Maddington and as you can see from the gleaming finish in the picture, he is pretty handy. He did the job for free. We whooshed past the $7500 mark and ended up with enough cash to pay for all transfer fees AND a couple of years insurance AND more than three years of servicing AND a fuel card loaded with enough credit to ensure Robbie won’t have to dip into his pocket at the bowser for a long, long time. I have to say, dear reader, I enjoyed writing that last sentence more than any other in 25 years of journalism. Robbie picked up the car on Friday. While he was signing the paperwork the general manager of the dealership, Mark Moyes, dropped the startling news that Canning Vale Toyota would be picking up the tab for the factory conversion to keyless entry and keyless ignition. Who says you can’t trust a car salesman! To the readers who stumped up to make this happen (believe me, I had to convince them to let me name names) a hearty thank you: Anthony Marinovich, Sue Low, Julia Ewert, Steve Woodland, Vince Haines, Philip McVeigh, Nic Hart, Katie McGregor and Chana Henry. Cheers to Jessica King, who casually dropped $1500 into the GoFundMe account, and Brett McDonald and the staff and suppliers at MECS Electrical and Controls, who tipped in an extraordinary $3500. Thanks to two generous donors who wanted to be known only as David and Rod and another who didn’t want more identification than his initials — SJ. Thanks to the husband and wife team who offered to put in a very large sum, and who, when I suggested we would hit our target with half that amount, pledged to donate the rest should we fall short. They, like many others, insisted on anonymity. You people aren’t like me; if I put $2 into a busker’s guitar case I find a way to drop it into conversation for three days. Oh, and I must mention the woman who offered her own car if we couldn’t get enough money to sort Robbie because she understood what it was like to be down on your luck. “It could be raining dicks and I would get smacked in the face with a giant rotten fish,” was her synopsis of her life. Brilliant.