Blair Vogler was at work on a Wednesday morning in July when her phone rang with a call from her husband. The couple were planning to leave work early to attend a funeral later that day, and Blair was running late.
Thinking that Lee Vogler was calling to ask if she had left yet, Blair didn’t answer the first time.
“Then it rang again, back to back, and I thought, ‘Well, I’d better answer,’” she said. “So I did, and I just heard him yelling.”
Lee, a Danville City Council member, had just been set on fire at his workplace on Main Street.
That was four months ago, and the Vogler family has since experienced ups and downs, progress and setbacks, support, rumors, surgeries, therapy, media attention and medical bills.
Shotsie Buck-Hayes, 30, was arrested and charged with aggravated malicious wounding and attempted first-degree murder a few hours after the attack. He’s been indicted on both charges, and a third of breaking and entering with intent to commit murder while armed with a deadly weapon.
A trial date will be set during Danville Circuit Court’s January term. In a partially complete psychological examination, Buck-Hayes has been determined to be competent to stand trial, though sanity at the time of the offense is still being evaluated, according to court records.
Buck-Hayes told Danville police during questioning that he attacked Lee — and planned to kill him — because Lee had had an affair with his wife.
Lee missed much of the news about the suspect immediately after the attack, as he was unconscious in the hospital for about a month with second- and third-degree burns to over half of his body.
The story below is based on a long interview with Lee and Blair, about four months after the attack. During the interview, Lee said he could not talk about the suspect until after the trial was over.
While her husband was unconscious, Blair received dozens of daily updates from his doctors and nurses, while also weighing decisions about their two young children without his input.
When Lee woke up, he still couldn’t talk, walk, feed himself or touch his face.
After exceeding his doctors’ expectations, Lee was released from the hospital in late October, months earlier than expected. One of the first things he did was attend that evening’s city council meeting.
He’s also been able to go to his son’s middle school football games, attend his daughter’s modeling shows and dress up with his family for Halloween.
But his recovery isn’t over.
Lee is still getting used to the new way his body moves and behaves. He’s sometimes surprised when he’s unable to do something that he used to do regularly, like turn a round doorknob or make the “hang ten” hand sign.
His voice has gotten stronger since his release from the hospital, and it now sounds much like it did before the attack. His face also looks much the same, though he now sports a beard and glasses because he can’t yet shave himself or put in contacts.
He can walk on his own — and even shuffle, guarding his son playing basketball — but his movements are stiffer than before.
Life looks different for the Voglers, and it always will.
For them, and for many others in Danville who read the July 30 headlines in disbelief, there will always be life before and life after that Wednesday morning.
Blair: How a normal day changed in the blink of an eye
It’s hard now for Blair Vogler to sum up her husband’s three-month hospitalization. Some moments from that time stand out in perfect clarity, and others are a blur.
She was constantly inundated with new information about his condition and learning about burn injuries and their complications.
Blair is a nurse in Reidsville, North Carolina, but she’s learned more than she ever hoped to know about burns in the past few months.
“One of the biggest things I learned was just how burns are such a different beast than any other kind of injury,” she said. “Every organ of your body, its functionality is affected, and physically, emotionally, psychologically, there are so many ups and downs.”
She was at work when she got the call from Lee on the day of the attack. She had been in nurse mode all day, and she had to stay in that mindset to process what had happened to her husband.
Neither Lee or Blair is certain about whether he actually dialed her number himself.
Lee was yelling into the phone, Blair said, and she didn’t understand what was happening until one of his coworkers took the phone and began explaining the situation.
Her first thoughts: How bad is it? Is he talking? What hospital is he going to?
“I just started going into that nurse-mode line of questioning to process in a non-emotional way,” she said.
Initially, she was told that it didn’t seem that bad — Lee was breathing, talking, and he knew what was going on.
But when first responders told Blair over the phone that he would be airlifted to a burn unit in North Carolina, and not taken to Danville’s hospital, she knew it was worse than it seemed.
Blair remembers being flustered — she couldn’t find her keys, so her coworker drove her to the helipad where Lee would be airlifted, but she couldn’t remember where exactly that was.
When they got there, she jumped over the locked gate and ran to the ambulance, which had also arrived. That’s when she learned that over 60% of his body had been burnt.
“As soon as I saw him I knew it was bad,” she said.
Still, it was hard for her to tell the extent of his injuries right away.
“When I first saw him, you couldn’t really tell how bad the burns were because everything was black, everything was charred,” she said. “I just remember seeing his eyes, his blue eyes with the black all around them.”
His teeth were black too, which immediately signaled to her that he had an airway injury. She told the first responders to intubate him, or put a tube down his throat for ventilation.
That nurse-mode detachment was quickly replaced with emotion when Lee began talking to her.
She was running her hands through his hair — the only part of his body she could touch — while he lay in the ambulance, even though the first responders had told her to leave the vehicle.
“Blair, I’m not going to make it,” he said.
He said it almost calmly, the way patients sometimes talked to Blair and other nurses after they’ve accepted the worst-case scenario.
That’s how he sounded when he told her, “I’m not going to make it. I can’t feel anything. I love you, I love the kids, I’m sorry.”
She pushed back, telling him over and over again that he would make it. “There were some expletives thrown in there,” she said.
After that, the first responders made her leave the ambulance so they could intubate and airlift Lee.
After the helicopter left, everything moved quickly, Blair said. But she held on to that last moment with Lee before she left the ambulance.
“I really didn’t know if it’d be the last time I’d ever talk to him,” she said. “And I didn’t talk to him again for a month.”
Lee: Voices and sounds, and then nothing
Lee said he has some fuzzy memories of that interaction with Blair. Mostly, he can remember voices and sounds, but he can’t visualize the moment.
He remembers asking a first responder if he was going to die.
“Not today,” he said.
Though he can’t remember those moments clearly, he remembers how he felt. Lee said he’s had concussions, been in car accidents, broken bones, but he’s never felt anything like those burns before.
“My body felt like it was shutting down… . I had never had that feeling of everything leaving my body,” he said. “That’s when I think I told Blair that I wasn’t going to make it, something’s really wrong.”
Lee remembers feeling the helicopter leave the ground, and then nothing else.
Blair: Watching her husband’s condition worsen overnight
Blair traveled to the burn unit at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill that afternoon.
She had met doctors, nurses and other hospital staff, and she was trying to remember all of their names. She had given her phone to someone else, unable to deal with the incessant notifications. She had already called her children, shifting back into mom mode, to explain as best she could what had happened to their dad.
When the medical staff told her she could see Lee in the intensive care unit later that evening, she wanted to go alone.
It’s a moment that stands still in her memory. She remembers where everyone was standing as she entered the room — and immediately got angry.
“You brought me to the wrong room,” she told the nurse. “This is not my husband.’”
She was livid that the hospital staff had made that mistake, after everything she had been through that day.
But it wasn’t the wrong room. “Blair, this is Lee,” the nurse told her.
“This is not Lee,” Blair said.
“He looked absolutely nothing like himself at that point,” she said. “You could see the injuries to his face, they had shaved his head, and he was so swollen from all the fluid that they had to pump in. It took me a while to believe it was actually him.”
She was grateful then that she had already decided that her kids wouldn’t come to the hospital right away, and that they would stay with her sister instead.
Blair had called 11-year-old Kingston and 7-year-old Ava separately earlier that day, explaining things to them in different ways.
“[Kingston] is 11, but he’s a very mature 11-year-old,” Blair said. “He’s very aware and competent, so I wanted him to hear it from me.”
With Ava, Blair was more high-level with her explanation.
“Dad’s hurt, I’m going to stay at the hospital for a while, and you get to have a sleepover with your cousins,” she told her daughter.
Protecting her kids was the only agency Blair felt like she had at that time. She had to trust the doctors and nurses at the hospital to do their job, and she had to do hers as a mother, she said.
Even then, there were limitations on what she could do.
Blair’s sister told her that a reporter from the Associated Press came to the door that afternoon while Kingston and Ava were there.
“That was really hard for me to hear afterwards, because my 7-year-old is there and she doesn’t know what happened,” Blair said.
Reporters overwhelmed Blair too on her drive to Chapel Hill. About 20 minutes into the trip, Blair said that calls from unknown numbers began flooding in.
Each time, she answered in case it was one of Lee’s doctors, and then hung up when it wasn’t.
“Every time I answered it would be a different reporter,” she said. “I wasn’t even at the hospital yet, so that made everything a whole different level of surreal.”
The rest of that first night in the hospital also felt surreal, Blair said.
Hospital staff barely left Lee’s room at all. A physician’s assistant pulled a stool and a computer on wheels and sat next to the bed.
“They were back and forth changing and tweaking every little thing all night long,” Blair said. “That’s when we learned that with burns, you don’t have all the injuries upfront.”
It can take up to 72 hours for symptoms to appear, Blair learned. All night long, Lee’s condition kept worsening.
The lab work, the infections, his lungs, the surface area, his blood pressure, all got worse and worse as the night went on.
By the next morning, doctors were talking to her about putting him on dialysis, a treatment for patients with failing kidneys. Luckily, that didn’t end up happening, Blair said.
“He was teetering on the edge,” she said. “For a while, things kind of went like that.”
The team of doctors told Blair that Lee’s injuries were “survivable,” but not that he would survive.
“The way they said it, it was hopeful but not guaranteed. … That was kind of the mantra for the next few days.”
Blair: Surgeons, children and tough calls
Three burn surgeons worked together on Lee’s first skin graft surgery. Afterward, they said it was one of the biggest skin grafts they had ever done, Blair said.
Over 60% of his body had been burnt, and the surgeons had to take an additional 30% of his skin to create grafts. That left 95% of his body open, meaning it had no intact skin, Blair said.
Blair decided to bring both Kingston and Ava to the hospital for the surgery, although they still wouldn’t see their father yet.
Instead, they got to meet members of the staff — surgeons, therapists and aftercare team members. The kids were encouraged to ask any questions they had.
They got badges and surgical hats, and the staff gave Ava a book about burns that they give to children who are burn patients.
The head surgeon came out of the operating room to talk to the kids during Lee’s surgery. She shook their hands and introduced himself by her first name. That was important, especially for Kingston, who wanted to feel like he was being told everything about his dad’s condition.
Later that day, when Blair asked her kids how they were doing, Ava surprised Blair with her response.
“Dad’s safe, he’s being taken care of,” she told her mom.
While she was still sitting with Ava, Blair got a call about the surgery, and she had to shift out of mom mode again.
Over the course of Lee’s operation, the surgical team had realized that his injuries were worse than they thought. Everything that they thought was a second-degree burn had converted to a third-degree burn.
“How can someone survive being 95% open?” Blair asked one of the surgeons.
The doctor was blunt.
“I’m not God. I’m a surgeon,” she said. “We’ve done our best, but it’s in the Lord’s hands now.”
Lee had another surgery on Aug. 27, the night before their 15th wedding anniversary, Blair said. Afterward, the surgeons told her that his body was resisting the antibiotics to treat infections, which are common in burn patients, especially when so much healthy skin has been taken for grafts.
It was the first time one of the doctors told her in real time that Lee might not make it. Then the doctor, crying, gave Blair a hug.
“I had to decide, do I bring the kids up here, do I call my parents, do I give it 24 hours, what do I do?” Blair said.
Other than the day of the attack, it was the scariest time for her.
She decided to wait. She was relieved when Lee started responding to antibiotics, after the doctors had switched them several times.
It had been several weeks since the attack by that point. That’s when Lee’s kids started asking to see him.
Blair: The way faces heal
Blair got Kingston and Ava into therapy the week after the attack, and the therapist told her to trust her gut about when they should see their dad.
The kids were going to have trauma either way, the therapist said.
Lee was still unconscious, so he couldn’t help her decide what was best.
“I didn’t have his input on what I should do, when they should come, I was making all the decisions on what’s best for everybody,” Blair said. “I knew what I thought he would want me to do.”
She waited for the swelling in Lee’s face to go down before bringing the kids to see him. Skin grafts to the face work differently than elsewhere on the body, Blair learned.
Doctors create a solution of skin cells using a skin cell sample and spray it onto the wound. This method can reduce scarring and accelerate healing. That was a blessing when it came to the kids’ visit, Blair said.
“It’s not that his face wasn’t burned badly, it was,” she said. “It’s just the way faces heal.”
Kingston and Ava actually thought their father looked younger than he had before when they saw him for the first time. They also thought it was funny that he was bald, because they had never seen him without hair, Blair said.
“He was still sedated, he still had everything hooked up to him, so we talked about the ventilator, all of the IVs, everything,” she said. “They were just really curious, and they were surprised at how good his face looked.”
The kids had already returned to school by then, Blair said.
She was initially nervous about that too, worried about how they would do in class and about what other kids would say, especially since Kingston was starting his first year of middle school.
She met with their principals, teachers, guidance counselors, who all put her at ease. The kids themselves were eager to go back to school too, not wanting to stand out any more than necessary by starting late.
“If someone says something to you or asks you something, it’s perfectly fine to tell them that you’re not going to talk about that,” Blair told Kingston and Ava.
Luckily, that hasn’t happened. “Adults have actually been harsher than the kids,” Blair said.
It helped that Lee was the baseball coach at Kingston’s middle school last year. Mostly, other kids just asked Kingston how Coach Lee was doing and when he’d be back.
Those were questions Kingston couldn’t answer. Lee was still unconscious, and doctors were predicting that he’d be in the hospital for at least six more months.
But a few weeks after Kingston and Ava saw Lee for the first time, he woke up.
Lee: Dreams, progress, setbacks, pain
Waking up, Lee wasn’t fully conscious right away. He drifted in and out of lucidity, and sometimes Blair and his doctors weren’t sure if he was really present or not.
“It wasn’t like I woke up and all of a sudden I was doing all of these things,” Lee said. “There was a time when I was really out of it.”
He was agitated and suspicious. At one point, he thought Blair was an imposter version of herself, and he was afraid and combative.
It was very emotional for her, she said, and it’s another time that sticks out vividly in her mind.
For Lee, it’s hazier. As they talk about that time, he asks Blair questions to confirm certain details — what the surgeons said about his first surgery, the name of the tube that was in his nose, a funny comment he made as he was regaining consciousness.
“It was hard to see,” she said. “You’ve gone a month without talking to someone that you talked to every day. One minute they know you and a few hours later, the next time they wake up, they’re scared of you.”
Some moments felt like Groundhog Day for Blair, she said, as she watched him wake up without remembering what happened the last time he was alert.
Later on, hospital staff would ask Lee, “Hey, do you remember when you did this?” or “Do you remember when this happened?”
His answer was usually no. He couldn’t tell the difference between real memories and dreams.
“Things that I thought were real, were not real,” he said. “It took a while to unwind that.”
He couldn’t talk when he first woke up, so he communicated with his family by blinking. Once for yes, twice for no. Then he began winking at Kingston and Ava.
Lee said the first fully conscious memory that he can put his finger on is ordering breakfast one day.
“My mind still wasn’t right, and I couldn’t think of what I actually liked for breakfast,” he said. “My mind for some reason went to what I know Kingston likes to eat for breakfast, which was scrambled eggs with cheese and orange juice.”
Blair came up with the name “the Kingston Special” for that breakfast.
Lee hasn’t spoken much about the difficulties of his recovery since he got back to Danville, mostly because he prefers to focus on the positive.
But there were some really hard days after he woke up, not only physically, but mentally too.
“There were days when I was just so down, and I couldn’t move,” he said. “I felt pain in every inch of my body, like down to my bones. It wasn’t a type of pain that I could equate to anything else.”
He couldn’t walk or feed himself, and he quickly learned that he would have to throw his pride and ego out the window.
“I was fully dependent on other people for basically everything,” he said. “That was really hard for me for a while. I don’t like asking for help, so that was a great lesson I learned through this.”
He also spent time in the hospital catching up on the news of the attack that had been reported across the world.
Most of the Danville community was supportive, in words and deeds. People brought gift cards to Blair’s family to take the kids out to eat or go to the movies, or offered to babysit or do yard work.
But there were some folks, mainly through social media comments about the alleged affair, who weren’t as kind to the Vogler family. Lee and Blair said they wouldn’t talk about the suspect or alleged motive, citing the ongoing legal case.
The vitriol on social media was only difficult to deal with because Blair was concerned about protecting her kids, she said.
“They’re already having to hear terms and have conversations they shouldn’t have at 7 and 11,” she said. “But people are going to say what they’re going to say, and I have no qualms about that.”
Lee said it didn’t bother him too much, given everything else he was going through.
“I look at it like this. I was set on fire and lived through it, so someone saying something on Facebook is not really going to hurt me,” he said. “If it makes them feel better to take the time out of their day to comment, God love them. I hope it helps them through their day.”
He made progress with walking laps, doing one more lap around the hospital floor than the day before. He had made it up to four laps in a row — a big feat, considering he initially celebrated making it to the end of the hallway and back — when his last skin graft surgery rolled around.
The surgery would focus on his neck, excising skin from his legs to graft onto the burns.
Afterward, his neck didn’t bother him, Lee said, but his legs hurt badly, hindering his plans to keep walking.
“I had just started making progress, and then I was set back and I was in so much pain,” Lee said.
Blair tried to encourage him to get up and walk, but Lee told her no. Frustrated by the setback, he asked her to feed him, even though he could now feed himself using utensils with extended handles that compensated for his limited range of motion.
It’s not that he couldn’t do it himself, but after that surgery, he just didn’t feel like doing anything.
“I retreated in a sense,” Lee said. “I wasn’t quitting, but I needed some sort of pause. It was too much.”
As his legs started to heal, Lee began walking again, surpassing his previous record for number of laps around the floor. One day he did 24, and the next day he did 70, he said.
Somewhere in that process — the timeline still isn’t super clear for him — a tracheostomy tube had been removed from his neck, and other tubes and electrodes were no longer needed. Those were positive steps that made him feel like he was progressing, he said.
Staff began talking about moving Lee (and the hundreds of photos that his mom had used to decorate the room) out of the ICU. Once he had moved, doctors told him he could be a candidate to go home.
“Tell me what I’ve got to do to go home and I’ll do it,” Lee told the doctors.
The medical staff put a date on his MyChart — Oct. 21 — that could possibly be the day he went home.
“Once I saw that, I was like, you cannot stop me from getting out of here on that day,” Lee said. “Blair will tell you, I was obsessed with it.”
Lee knew Kingston had a football game on the 21st, and Ava had a modeling show a few weeks later. He also knew that Danville’s city council would meet that day, and before he was attacked, he hadn’t missed a city council meeting in over a decade.
“If you don’t want me to get out of here yet, you never should’ve put that date on there,” Lee told his doctors. “If I don’t go home that day, I will be far less productive here.”
He had a checklist of things to complete before he could go home, with occupational therapy requirements being the main hold up.
The OT team agreed to sign off on his release if he could come back down to the hospital three times a week to do occupational therapy as an outpatient.
“So that’s what I’ve been doing since,” Lee said. “We’re down there Monday, Wednesday, Friday.”
Lee and Blair: Getting back to normal when everything is different
Since he’s been home, Lee has been able to return to some aspects of his previous life — attending city events, going on family outings, and helping plan the annual Harry Johnson Holiday Classic middle school basketball tournament.
But there are other things that are drastically different.
“Opening doors,” Lee said. “The round knob is hard to get a grip on and turn it… . There’s been some times in the house where I forget and accidentally shut it behind me, and then I have to call, ‘Hey I’m stuck.’”
Lee is working on improving his grip strength, but he doesn’t have much function in his left hand due to nerve damage. His right hand is better, though his thumb and index finger on that hand don’t have much feeling either.
This prevents him from shaving himself, and he’s nervous to let someone else do it, so he’s been sporting a beard lately — a new look for him. He also can’t put in his contact lenses, so he’s wearing a new pair of glasses.
“It’s dumb, but my pose in every picture since I was a teenager was the hang ten, and I really can’t do it yet,” Lee said. “I’m doing a thumbs up until I can get my fingers to cooperate.”
He realized this during the Veterans Day parade in Danville, when he tried to make the signal without thinking and realized he couldn’t do it.
As his recovery continues, Lee is looking forward to throwing a baseball with Kingston, who’s a pitcher, and picking up Ava as part of a choreographed father-daughter dance near Christmas.
Blair helps him with some exercises and physical therapy at home, mostly stretching and massaging the parts of his body that received skin grafts.
“With burns, and skin grafts, the skin contracts in certain areas as it tries to heal. This is another thing I learned,” Blair said. “So in the bends of his elbows, under his arms, his neck, all that skin tries to contract. Basically, we have to massage it and stretch it so that it kind of microtears and forms back.”
At one point during his hospitalization, Lee had 12 different conditions — pneumonia, a GI bleed, which is common for burn patients, a gall bladder complication, and significant lung injuries.
Some longer-term burn complications are still with him. He developed a condition called heterotopic ossification, or HO.
“Basically, you get bone growth in the muscles and the joints and places that aren’t normal,” Blair said.
“I have it in both elbows and shoulders,” said Lee.
“Which is another thing that limits his range of motion and functionality,” Blair added.
The couple explained the condition, after chronicling the details of Lee’s hospitalization and recovery, while sitting at a restaurant’s outdoor patio on a recent November Saturday.
Lee wore braces on both hands, but he was able to feed himself without utensils, which he couldn’t do when he left the hospital almost a month before.
Eventually, he will be able to get laser surgery to remove the bone growth, which will help his range of motion return to “pre-injury level,” Blair said. But they have to wait until the HO stops progressing first, and there’s no way to know when that will be.
Blair has also been learning about mentorship programs for burn injury survivors and their families. Other survivors might make a good community for Lee, because although she was there every step of the way with him, she can’t fully understand his experience.
“I can listen, and I can empathize, but only to a certain degree,” Blair said. “I know what it’s like as a family member, but I don’t know what he’s gone through and I never can.”
Conversations with other family members of burn patients were a big help in getting her through Lee’s hospitalization, she said. One time, she was able to return the favor when a burn patient came in with similar injuries to Lee’s.
She was in the waiting room when that patient came in, and she struck up a conversation with his wife.
“As much as it helped me to have people talk about what they’ve been through and getting to the other side, it was just as cathartic for me to do that for her,” Blair said. “Just to know there’s help and spread awareness.”
Lee is looking forward to getting back to his work at Showcase Magazine, which he hopes to do by the end of the year.
He and his family are enjoying time together after months apart and looking forward to Christmas, especially since there was a time where he thought he wouldn’t be home for the holiday.
The day he left the hospital, Lee’s doctors and nurses had a send-off party, shaking pom-poms and holding up signs. When they asked what song he wanted to play as he walked out of the hospital, Lee didn’t have to think very hard.
“‘Comin’ Home’ by KISS,” he told them.
Before the attack, Lee affectionately referred to his hometown of Danville as “the comeback city” and himself as the “comeback kid.” No one expected that his comeback would include recovery from extensive burn injuries.
The old nickname has a new meaning, but it’s one that still fits.