Miracles arise from the darkest of places, and that’s where Kenny Holcomb found himself in late August, 2006 — at the crossroads of grief and despair, seething at himself and the world in the parking lot outside a Colorado Springs emergency room.
He’d failed at being a good father, good husband, good person, and now, he’d failed his family in the ultimate way. The weight of it all came crushing down in the brief, forever moments as he sat in his truck preparing to chase the Flight for Life helicopter that would whisk his 2-year-old daughter to Children’s Hospital Colorado in Aurora, where specialists were on standby.
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They’d all been told to prepare for, and expect, the worst.
Emergency room doctors in Colorado Springs told Holcomb and his wife, Monica, that the traumatic fracture of their daughter Jazmyn’s skull had caused an out-of-control brain bleed. The toddler likely would not wake from her coma, might not even survive the flight to the hospital in the Denver suburbs.
“They told us to say our goodbyes,” Kenny said, his voice quaking.
There is no pain like that of a parent hearing such words.
Jazmyn Holcomb, 22, shows the X-ray of her cracked skull after falling from her two-story bedroom window when she was 2 years old. Doctors in Colorado Springs told her family she probably wouldn’t survive the Flight for Life helicopter ride to Children’s Hospital Colorado in Aurora, let alone have a normal life if she did. (Christian Murdock, The Gazette)
But it was the horror, and then the blessing, that changed everything for the Holcomb family.
“It’s 20 years, you know, and still every time I tell the story … it’s such a weird thing to say, but I’m glad this happened, you know,” Kenny said. “You would never ever want something like that to happen to your children.
“But I can’t imagine things now if it didn’t.”
An answered prayer
This isn’t a story about why parents of young children should always double-check window stability and safety (they absolutely should, but is it too much to ask that a second-story window be toddler-proof?)
This is about a horrible accident that, by all accounts, should have been deadly but wasn’t, and about how lives can be broken and rebuilt from a single moment.
Some see it as divine grace, an answered prayer.
The Holcombs certainly do.
Jazmyn Holcomb, 22, front left, is surrounded by her father Kenny, mother Monica, front right, and three of her five sisters at her parents’ home in Peyton on Friday, Oct. 16, 2026. Her three sisters pictured are Alana Holcomb, 23, on the far right; Kristina Oakley, 25, on the back left, and Isabella Holcomb, 17, in the middle. (Christian Murdock, The Gazette)
On that day, Aug. 27, 2006, Monica had just finished bathing 2-year-old Jazmyn and her 3-year-old sister, Alana, at the home the family was renting in Colorado Springs.
The toddlers favored a carpeted window seat in front of a second-story bedroom window that overlooked the driveway leading into the garage, where they could watch the world, so headed there after the bath, as usual. It was a warm summer day, so the glass pane of the window panel had been slid open, like any other day.
“Next thing I remember, Alana came running downstairs … and said, ‘Dad, Jazmyn fell,’” Kenny said. “I didn’t know what she meant, so I went to go upstairs and she grabbed my hand very calmly and she said, ‘No, she’s outside.’”
Despite her young age at the time, Alana said she still recalls the sound of the screen window pushing free of its moorings, as well as what came after.
“I remember watching her fall down and her body hitting the concrete,” said Alana, now 23. “I remember going to the hospital .. and crying .. and (how) I thought it was my fault.”
Jazmyn Holcomb, 22, has the words “Talitha Cumi” tattooed on her arm. It’s an Aramaic phrase found in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus raises a young girl from the dead. Jesus took her by the hand and said the words, which mean “little girl, I say to you, get up.” Twenty years after the tragedy that almost took her life, Holcomb is preparing to take the boards to become a radiologist so she can care for children who are in the same situation she was in. (Christian Murdock, The Gazette)
As soon as Alana alerted her parents, Kenny dashed down the stairs to the basement level and opened the garage door to find his daughter’s tiny body sprawled on the ground.
“I ran over and I picked up her lifeless body, and I noticed the top of her head was flat. There’s a big flat spot on the side of her head,” he said.
He and Monica loaded Jazmyn gently into their truck and gunned it to the nearest ER, figuring that was faster than waiting for an ambulance. During the trip, the toddler threw up and then stopped breathing.
“When we walked to the hospital, we walked in with a lifeless 2-year-old little girl,” Kenny said.
Faith reenters the family’s life
He recalled how the nurses and doctors descended on them as soon as they walked in, instantly recognizing the critical nature of the injuries.
“They basically immediately gave her all of their attention, and they began to work on her. And they had gotten a heartbeat, but the second they got a heartbeat, she began to seize,” he said. “Her hair was still wet. She’s still in a diaper from the bath …
“They said if she survives, she’ll never be the same.”
A picture of Jazmyn Holcomb after she left the hospital in 2006 is taped to the Bible of her father, Kenny Holcomb. Her father gave her the Bible years later. (Christian Murdock, The Gazette)
Kenny said he and the family were given “five minutes” to say what they needed to say.
“I knew she was going to die, so we went to leave and there was a chaplain there, a young woman,” he said. “She was just so genuine and sincere and loving, so peaceful. She got us all to come and gather around, and she prayed for all of us.”
Both Kenny and Monica were raised in the church, but as adults and parents faith hadn’t played a defining role in their lives.
Faith reentered their lives that day, said Kenny.
As he sat beside his father, Allen Holcomb, who had rushed to the hospital as soon as he got the news of his granddaughter’s fall, Kenny’s fear and desperation catalyzed into .. something else.
“All I could think about was how she deserved a better life, how she deserved a better father, how my wife deserved a better husband,” he said. “For the first time in my life, I cried out to Jesus and I meant it. And something — I didn’t know exactly what was going on at the time — came in that truck. Something fell over me.
“It felt like for the first time I could breathe.”
A brush with death is often what it takes to realize the worth and fragility of a life you took for granted.
A brush with death can also open the door to a faith you hadn’t realized was there all along.
“It felt like there was a weight lifted off of my shoulders,” Kenny said. “I told my dad, ‘She’s gonna be OK.’”
An hour-by-hour miracle
He was right, despite all seeming medical odds.
Jazmyn survived the helicopter trip to Aurora, where brain scans showed that the devastating injuries she’d presented with — and which were recorded by prior tests — were not as bad as previously thought.
“The first thing he (the doctor) said was, ‘We did a brain scan, but it doesn’t line up with what they sent to us from Colorado Springs. It actually looks like less blood, which doesn’t make any sense,’” he said.
Scans continued, each of which showed the injuries were healing at a remarkable rate, the damage less than it was.
Notations and highlighted Scriptures fill Jazmyn Holcomb’s Bible that was given to her by her father, Kenny Holcomb. (Christian Murdock, The Gazette)
“Every time they checked it, there was less blood,” Kenny said. “They put her in ICU, full watch. And every hour or so, they would check it again. Less blood. They couldn’t make any sense why all this blood was leaving her brain so rapidly. They couldn’t make any sense how she came out of that coma on her own.
“They didn’t understand why her brain was functioning so well.”
Dad was confident he knew the reason.
By Day Three, Jazmyn had been moved to a rehabilitation center with a plastic playground.
By Day Four, she’d been cleared to return home.
“The swelling had gone down from her brain,” said Monica, whose family has since moved to a home in Peyton. “The only thing she had was a black eye.”
Half-a-year later, only those who had been there — or knew where to look for the scar on her head — had any inkling of what had happened.
“I read the notes from my six-month follow-up, and they’re, like, ‘Patient is fine. She is running around the room,’” said Jazmyn, who’s now 22.
Dedicating her life to serving others
Twenty years after the day that changed everything, she understands the science thoroughly enough to be in awe of what it can’t neatly explain.
She was a toddler. Her skull was soft.
She was dead. Then she wasn’t.
“And look at this,” she said, pulling up a copy of her cranial scans on her phone to show how the fracture closed over the course of the hours and days she was in the hospital.
The only physical remnants of the near-tragedy that charted the course of her — and her family’s – future are now a roughly three-inch scar, about as wide as a pinky finger, entirely hidden under her long, black hair.
Its legacy, though, can be seen and felt … well, everywhere.
Jazmyn is due to graduate from Casa Loma College in Aurora on Nov. 2, and days later will sit for her board exam to become a Radiologic Technologist.
“My plans are either CT or MRI,” she said.
Whatever field she lands in, she said she hopes to work with children, work she got the chance to experience at a Colorado Springs hospital as part of the clinical training component of her studies.
“It’s so common, when little kids come in … all of the technologists that I work with for school are so scared to X-ray a child,” she said. “They’re scared … because the kids are scared. But something comes over me, and I’m, like, ‘I’m gonna help this kid.’”
All those big machines are scary looking, but they’re not monsters. They take pictures that “make you better.”
She tells them she understands their fears, because she’s been there.
And that sometimes, you’ve got to travel through the darkest of places to get to the miracle.