After lightning strikes teen group, one faces months-long recovery

SALT LAKE CITY — All of the teens hospitalized after being shocked by a lightning strike have been released from the hospital.

14-year-old Kaileigh Saling, the last of the hospitalized teens, went home Sunday night.

Kaleigh Saling said the lightning strike hit just inches from where she was walking.

“I heard this huge boom and my ears started ringing and I just went up and went down all at the same time,” Kaileigh Saling said.

The force was so strong it threw her into the air, Saling said.

“As I was on the ground it felt like I was being coddled in like a cloud or a pillow,” Kaileigh Saling said. “And they lifted my head and I just felt like bricks and gravity was just being thrown on top of me.”

“She was next to the person holding the umbrella, where the lightning struck,” Rachel Saling, Kaileigh’s mom, said.

Kaileigh Saling’s mom thinks the current passed through an umbrella, held by a teenage boy walking next to Kaileigh Saling.

“[The umbrella] flew out of his hand,” Kaileigh Saling added.

While the boy holding the umbrella was also shocked, the two teens walking on either side of him, Kaileigh Saling and Bo Chapman, suffered more serious injuries and were flown to the hospital, according to Kaileigh Saling.

“The boy with the umbrella would’ve been right over here because her right side was the one that was affected,” said Rachel Saling. “[Bo] was on his other side.”

Kaileigh Saling was initially flown to Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital in Lehi but later transferred to the Salt Lake City campus where her room was next to Bo Chapman, 14.

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