Linking the heartbreaking loss of a 17-year-old girl to a frog would seem an almost ludicrous concept. The Blundells acknowledge that some may take that view of their effort.
Unless, they say, you knew that 17-year-old girl, Stacey Blundell.
Killed in a drunken driving wreck three days before Christmas 2001, Stacey was memorialized in a number of ways – a scholarship that awarded $15,000 over the years; a garden at Naperville Central High School, where she was a student; and another garden that neighbors created in front of the Blundell family’s Naperville home.
But something was missing in all of that. In addition to teaching Sunday school, Stacey worked part time at a pet store and used much of her pay to buy dozens of tiny pets – mostly frogs and toads – that she placed in four terrariums in her bedroom.
Her brother, Phil, wanted to memorialize his sister in a way that she would find fun, something that would align more with her personality.
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The result is a new exhibit at Brookfield Zoo that is much more than a display of amphibians. It is helping save an all-but-extinct species while demonstrating the power of one girl and the network of those who love her, starting with her brother.
“There’s been times when it’s been kind of an uphill battle,” Phil Blundell said of the family’s struggles in dealing with Stacey’s death. “It’s been kind of nice when we reach the top, to have something like this there.”
On a recent snowy morning when Phil Blundell visited the zoo, 19 Panamanian golden frogs, a precious commodity in yellow-orange skin splotched with black, hid in the lush exhibit. Panama’s national animal, the frog is poisonous but considered good luck and once was abundant around cool streams in forests there.
But an invasive fungus, pollution, habitat loss and illegal collectors have decimated the species. Some experts estimate the population in the wild at 450; others contend the amphibians are extinct in the wild.
“This really has been my bright spot,” Blundell said of the exhibit, a cube measuring 4 feet tall by 4 feet wide and 3 feet deep. It opened in mid-January in Brookfield’s reptiles and birds building.
“It’s one of the things I took direct control of and kind of spawned. A lot of the other things for her were great, but this is the one thing I thought that Stacey would really enjoy and that we would be able to enjoy with her had she still been here.”
Blundell was in eighth grade when Stacey died after an SUV she was riding in crashed into trees in Naperville. He had been looking forward to entering Naperville Central the next year, where his sister, a senior, would be eager to shepherd him through the transition.
Instead, everybody knew Phil for a different reason, said his father, Ted Blundell.
“Phil entered high school as the kid who lost his sister,” he said. “There was some anger there.”
Amazing animals
The family doesn’t care to discuss Sean McNees, the then-16-year-old intoxicated driver who pleaded guilty in Stacey’s death and received a six-month jail sentence. After his release, McNees was accused three times of violating his probation and in 2006 was sentenced to six years in prison for the latest of those violations. He served his sentence and was released.
And Phil Blundell, 24, doesn’t care to discuss his low points in the 11 years without his sister. He acknowledges he was angry, but like his parents, he appreciated the overwhelming support from family and friends.
Some of those gestures were grand. At her wedding, Stacey’s close friend, Carlene Haavig, made donations to the scholarship fund in guests’ names instead of supplying party favors to them. When Stacey died, Ted Blundell backed out of a business he was preparing to launch with two friends. But former colleagues who had established a successful insurance underwriting firm in California came to his rescue, asking him to open a Chicago office.
Others were smaller – meals, letters and cards around the anniversary of Stacey’s death, a frog bracelet left in the mailbox with a note that the buyer saw the bracelet in Hawaii, thought of Stacey and wanted the family to have it.
“You gotta look back and see where you were given your blessings,” said Stacey’s mother, Jamie. “Not to sound like Pollyanna. It’s been really hard and it’s been sad, but hey, we’re still together. The three of us. We made it.”
Jamie Blundell said the family was determined that Phil “would know we’re still a family … that our family was not going to stop because Stacey has been killed … and we’re going to have to get through it and figure it out.
“But there’s no road map,” she added. “You can read all the books you want. Let me tell you, you’ve got to live it day by day; sometimes hour by hour.”
After eight years, during which the scholarship awarded each of 15 high school students $1,000, the Blundell family started feeling that the effort had run its course, Jamie Blundell said. Besides, Phil hadn’t been involved in establishing the scholarship. His parents wanted to give him a chance to create a memorial to his sister, and that ended up having a restorative effect on Phil.
He suggested Brookfield Zoo, where the family formed joyful memories when brother and sister were very young. Jamie called the zoo and asked about creating a memorial related to frogs.
Word reached Jeff Mitchell, associate curator of aquatics and reptiles for the Chicago Zoological Society, which manages the zoo. He immediately thought of Panamanian golden frogs.
“It’s such an important conservation project that the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and Brookfield are doing,” Mitchell said. Also, he said, the breeding program had been occurring behind the scenes for years.
“I really wanted an opportunity to bring it out to the public and show them these amazing animals that we’ve been working with.”
The idea came together quickly. The Blundells closed the scholarship last spring and transferred the money to fund an exhibit and a breeding program that had started when Brookfield received four Panamanian golden frogs in 2008.
Mitchell roughed out a design and contacted Living Color Enterprises Inc., designers and manufacturers of custom aquariums and cabinetry.
Based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the company also is the subject of a reality TV show, “Fish Tank Kings,” on Nat Geo Wild, the National Geographic channel. For the exhibit’s opening in January, a crew from the show came to Brookfield and Naperville to shoot a segment, expected to run this summer.
In addition to the 19 frogs in the exhibit, an additional 16 reside behind it, Mitchell said, and the zoo is nurturing about 150 tadpoles.
‘With us every day’
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Saving a species on the brink was critical to Phil Blundell, and Stuart Strahl, the zoological society’s president and CEO, said the Blundells’ effort reinforces a theme the zoo has been emphasizing in recent years: one family, even one person, can make a difference in conservation.
“People live on in your memory,” Strahl said, “not just in their lives but what their lives meant to others.”
Jamie Blundell said Stacey “is with us every single day,” and Blundell wonders how the family survived, how they carried all the emotion sparked by her daughter’s loss.
Stacey always wanted to be famous, Jamie Blundell said. And, like many parents of children who die young, Ted and Jamie Blundell said they constantly worry that she will be forgotten, particularly after they pass.
Then, preserving his sister’s memory will be left to Phil. If he has a family, Jamie Blundell said, she envisions him bringing them to the frog case and pointing to a plaque under the exhibit that reads “In Loving Memory of Frog Enthusiast Stacey Blundell.”
Then he could point to the left side of the exhibit at the secret tribute.
Right there with the frogs, where Stacey would like it, are two letters formed in the rock: “SB,” for Stacey Blundell.