Kristen Lappas, traveling from Manhattan to Manhattan, went to great lengths to try to form a reunion.
But when the New York-based ESPN producer approached the quiet hospital in northeast Kansas, she confirmed for herself what others had been telling her.
“The hospital, it’s like nobody’s in it,” she said. “It’s very strange. And then I understood the phone conversations.”
Lappas first got wind of Frank Martin’s near-death experience a few years ago. A family friend of the Martins is an equipment manager at Southern Methodist University who Lappas interviewed for a previous feature.