Ryan HockensmithDec 10, 2025, 08:30 AM ETCloseRyan Hockensmith is a Penn State graduate who joined ESPN in 2001. He is a survivor of bacterial meningitis, which caused him to have multiple amputation surgeries on his feet. He is a proud advocate for those with disabilities and addiction issues. He covers everything from the NFL and UFC to pizza-chucking and analysis of Tom Cruise’s running ability.Follow on X
HE IS HALF ASLEEP when he feels his dad slam the brakes of his van. Larry Pickett Jr.’s head darts up from the back seat, and he squints his eyes to try to understand the mayhem on the road in front of him.
All six people in the van — Pickett, his mom, dad, two sisters and his girlfriend — are racing to synthesize what happened before they arrived. This is one of those rare moments in life that people stumble into, where they have to decide whether to run toward danger or stay safe on the perimeter.
Pickett sits up in his seat but doesn’t say anything. Then a familiar voice cuts through the air: “Larry, you have to get that man out of the car,” his mom says. Pickett, 20, streaks out of the van, toward the car, the power line flopping and spraying electricity near the car.
WHEN PICKETT GETS to the car, the man isn’t moving. He’s staring off into space, blinking but frozen. Pickett notices a power line directly under the driver’s side, and he pauses for a moment. He feels heat pouring from inside of the car and he can’t help but wonder if the man is being electrocuted.
The car has become what electricity expert John Averrett calls a “Faraday cage,” which is a structure meant to conduct electricity — even from a lightning strike — without harming the person inside. The rubber tires can dump the voltage from the metal car into the ground without shocking the person inside.
Averrett, an electrical engineer who is licensed in 20 states and has done energy work for several NASA shuttles, has actually seen cases where people in cars think they are OK, then get out of the car and are killed by the voltage in the ground.
Pickett feels nothing, though, as he grabs the driver’s body from behind the steering wheel. The man, David Denton, is lodged and motionless, and Pickett quickly realizes as he yanks on his body that he isn’t going to be able to maneuver the man out of the car and not hit the wire.
He pulls again, managing to get Denton angled out the side of the car, but he isn’t sure if he will be able to lug him any farther. The entire car seems to be getting hotter by the second. He feels like the clock is ticking down fast and he needs help.
That’s when he realizes someone is beside him at the exact moment he needs him. It’s one of his heroes — his dad, Larry Pickett, Sr.
THE HELP KICK-STARTS Pickett Jr. He muscles up and pulls the man’s torso out of the car. Larry Sr. gets under the man’s legs, but he immediately loses his footing and falls to his hip on the ground, dangerously close to the downed power line.
But he manages to scramble back to his feet and help carry the man across the street as another tire pops. “The best way to describe it is that it was like there were fireworks going off,” Pickett Jr. says.
His mom, Shawnonne, gets his 15-year-old sisters, Lauren and Olivia, into the van, as Lauren films most of the rescue. The scene is terrifying, even from a distance, but Shawnonne is heard on video urging them on.
Three decades earlier, she met Larry Sr. in what would be a great rom-com setup. Larry, 17, was riding in a friend’s car on Dec. 23, 1996, when a beautiful 15-year-old girl named Shawnonne (pronounced Shuh-known) Taylor made her way through a crosswalk in front of them. He felt like he was meant to talk to her, but his friend drove off before he could. An hour later, when he ran into her on another street in Raleigh, he felt like fate had swiped right on them.
Next, he pulled off an approach that will forever be a part of their family lore. He introduced himself to her, but instead of asking for her number, he wrote down his and handed it to her. She thought he was very good-looking and appreciated that he didn’t ask for her number — she considered it gentlemanly to leave her feeling no pressure to ever call. And the fact that he had a Nokia cellphone certainly didn’t hurt.
In the background, the car goes up in flames, all four tires melting down until the metal touches the ground. That amount of heat, Averrett says, will cause an explosion in just a few seconds, and that’s what happens. With the power off 20 minutes later, the local fire department is able to douse the flames before they reach a nearby propane tank.
Averrett is at a complete loss for how Denton and the Picketts survived such a dangerous scene. On a Zoom call, he just looks off into the distance and says, “You always hear that God has his hand on a lot of things. This may have been one of them.”
A month after the accident, Shawnonne sits beside Lauren and Olivia across the table from Larry Sr. and me at Overtime Sports Pub. I run through all the different ways that that night could have gone horribly wrong. All of the Picketts are attentive people — when someone is speaking, they never seem to be waiting to respond. They leave space for whatever someone is saying to them.
There’s silence when I get through with my list of terrible possibilities. A few seconds go by and nobody says anything. The girls’ eyes move from mom and dad, and then over to me. At first, I couldn’t quite decipher what the looks mean.
Then Larry Sr. speaks. “I’ve had people say we should have waited for the police to arrive,” he says. “But there’s no way he would have gotten out of that car.”
He’s not dramatic when he says it. It’s very monotone, like he’s reading off road directions. I stare over at Shawnonne, and so do the girls. I’m expecting her to have some second thoughts, to contemplate the idea that maybe in retrospect, they might have been a little more cautious.
But that’s not how the Picketts walk through the world. What happened that night was what needed to be done, and so it was done. They believe the right thing can sometimes be scary, but that’s because it’s the right thing, there shall be no handwringing, regardless of the outcome.
NEARLY 10 MINUTES after arriving at the scene, the Picketts sit across the street with Denton. He’s wide awake now but completely woozy. He’s on his butt on the ground, his back against Pickett Jr.’s legs.
“I’m just thankful that we were in the right place at the right time,” Pickett Jr. says. “A lot of different things had to go right that night for it to work out the way that it did. I was just a small part of what happened.”
Larry Sr. is a wizard with cameras and video editing (he owns a multimedia company in Raleigh), so he takes the footage that Lauren had shot earlier in the night and makes a Facebook post before they go to bed. He keeps telling Pickett Jr. that he is a hero, and his son just smiles and shakes his head.
He’s a stoic 6-1 young man who is 195 pounds of “yes, sir” and “thank you, ma’am” and might very well be a starting safety for Army a year or two from now. But he is also very warm, with a smile that is easily accessible. Teammates gently goof on him for being so straightlaced, like the time players went around the room announcing their celebrity crush. When it was Pickett’s turn, he said, “My girlfriend,” and everybody yelled, “Shut up!” at him.
Pickett Jr. continues to try to stiff-arm the compliments as he turns in for the night. But Larry Sr. is just too proud to not tell his son — and the world — what an awesome kid he has watched grow up. By the time Pickett’s head hits the pillow at around 3 a.m., he’s done cringing at his family for the night.
Little does he know that as he brushes his teeth, a few million people around the world have begun to go wild over the Gen Zer who saved a guy’s life.
KIDS THESE DAYS, RIGHT? Perhaps no comment summarizes today’s youth better than this popular quote: “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants.”
This age-old generational divide is, of course, a two-way street. Aristotle’s daughter was probably rolling her eyes as he told her to go touch some grass, then responding with her own version of “OK, boomer.”
British psychology researcher Amy Orben recently coined a term for this consistent societal dread: The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics, named for the Greek mythological character doomed to an eternity of pushing a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down over and over again.
Rosario de Guzman is one of many experts who share those worries but also say to take a deep breath and try to zoom out to see the whole picture. Kids will always be one big sauce, a blend of ingredients that has, for centuries now, mostly ended up coming out just fine. “As we discuss all the problems facing this generation, just try to realize there are things to celebrate, too,” she says.
Touching grass is a foundational principle at Little People Preschool in Raleigh, where a young boy named Larry Pickett Jr. enrolled 17 years ago. This is the Pickett family business now — Shawnonne has gone from a teacher when Pickett Jr. was a toddler to co-owning the school with her husband. Larry Sr. joined her after a very successful 20-year career in auto sales. They loved the school so much that they had to buy it.
“Kids are innocent and hopeful,” Shawnonne says. “Why are they trying to fill space in their lives with screens? That’s on us as adults. They have only been clouded with whatever you provided for them.”
“My parents have always had a great passion to just help the kids of our generation — help nurture us, love us, help the kids love each other,” Larry Jr. says, “so that hopefully we can grow up in this world and go and do great things as we share that same love and compassion toward other people.”
The 4-year-olds all go inside a few minutes later for a math lesson that Miss Shawnonne is going to teach. She comes in with one onion and a basket of tomatoes that she had gotten at a local farmer’s market a few days before. She puts the basket down and asks the kids to each pick out a tomato as she sets down a scale on the table.