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Michael Appleby
 A fine athlete who stood out in football, swimming, wrestling, basketball and baseball, Michael Appleby is remembered by his schoolmates as a loyal friend with a ready smile. His family remembers him as “unusually loving and generous.” “Michael was such an unselfish person. He would have given a stranger the shirt off his back,” says his sister, Kristen Appleby.
Michael celebrated his 16th birthday on November 10, 2001 by spending the evening at home with friends and family, eating pizza, watching movies and playing video games. A mere ten days later, Michael’s family would enter into a world of horror and disbelief. While his parents were discussing Thanksgiving plans at Michael’s aunt and uncle’s house, Michael took his two younger cousins for a drive around the block.
Only five minutes later, his mother was peering into the darkness off the road not 50 yards from her brother’s house. At the bottom of a hill off the roadside was the car her son had been driving. It was resting on its top. “I ran to the bottom of the hill to see a body under the car. I thought it was Michael’s cousin, Andrew, and I was looking all around the car for Michael. Then, my husband came down the hill and said Andrew was standing at the top of the hill,” she said. “I didn’t know he was dead. I remember seeing the Life-Force helicopter hovering. And then it flew away. There was no bringing Michael back. The car had landed on him.”
His 14 year-old cousin was buckled into the passenger seat and escaped without serious injury. Her 15 year-old brother, in the back seat and without a seatbelt, was thrown from the car and sustained a concussion. Both would later report that Michael had tried to buckle up but that he couldn’t get the seat belt to come away from the door. Thinking he was just going around the block, he drove off without buckling up.
Out of that tragic oversight, MAKUS was born. “We’ve looked back at our family movies and the kids were always in seatbelts,” says Judy Appleby. “This one time, Michael didn’t take the time to make it work. Now we want to make sure other kids know ‘this is what can happen to you’.”
The Appleby family and many of his friends have thrown themselves into the cause they hope will save lives -- the cause they wish could have been around to save Michael. They want to make sure Michael’s death had a purpose. They want him to live on in MAKUS.
“God needed Michael to bring MAKUS about,” says Kirsten Fox, his girlfriend at the time of his death. “He was a protector, always making sure everybody was okay. In a way, I guess he still is.”
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