Based on the Incredible True Story…

JR Ballentine, a hard-working eighteen-year old boy from a small town in Tennessee outside of Nashville, just days after his Senior Prom and his biological father reconnects with him after sixteen absent years of drugs, booze, and breaking hearts, dies in an unexpected car crash on the treacherous “Ridge.”

The exact circumstances of the crash on Ridgetop Road, still, to this day, remain mysterious. Eyewitnesses claim they saw the driver of the vehicle that had swerved into JR’s drinking at a barbecue earlier that day.

To this day, the facts remain largely unknown. Nothing has been proven. No blood alcohol tests were ever administered by local law enforcement.

The driver’s girlfriend died on impact. JR died an hour later.

But, as JR’s mother, Lori Gregory, soon learns, her son did not have to die that day. This passionate mother-on-a-mission, on her eight-year quest to uncover the sinister truth, learns that her son’s death was not only preventable: it was due to a matter of public policy, a glaring loophole in the law.

First-responders tried to save Lori’s son. That day, however, they were not allowed to do their jobs. That day, greed and power-hungry politicians won over the decency of humanity. That day, JR did not just die…

He was murdered.

Help could have arrived in minutes. Instead, it came an hour late, an hour too late. That day, a technicality became a tragedy.

Just before his untimely death, JR came out as gay to his family. Two weeks before JR left this world, his older brother, Keith, punched JR in the face in a fit of rage and bad blood.

The brothers had not been on speaking terms when JR left this world. JR’s stepfather was hard on him. At this time, JR was just beginning to get to know the man his mother had been forced to leave when he was just two years old - his father.

On their way home from a weekend camping trip celebrating Lori’s birthday, Lori and JR’s stepfather, Daniel, see emergency lights in the distance. Driving past the mangled crash site, the couple does not notice anything out of the ordinary at the scene. But Lori’s motherly intuition immediately tells her that something is not right.

Little does Lori know that somewhere under the burning wreckage in that upside-down car dangling on the side of the Ridge, her little boy lies trapped, slowly suffocating, slowly dying.

Lori and Daniel pull into their neighborhood, arriving at their humble home at the end of the long dead-end road. In their driveway is a lone police car.

Lori woke that morning excited and slightly dismayed to celebrate her fortieth birthday.

Lori went to bed that night begging for a miracle, screaming at the dark sky for a sign from God. God, however, had a very different plan that day.

JR’s biological father flies in from out of state when he gets the news, but the man does not arrive at the hospital in time.

The doctors keep JR alive on life-support for as long as they can. Like Lazarus, they bring JR back from the dead again and again. Eventually, out of luck, the doctors tell Lori that there is nothing more they can do for her son.

JR Gregory is declared brain dead two hours after the fatal crash.

On her birthday, Lori Gregory makes the most difficult decision of her life. Holding her son’s hand, Lori nods her head and allows the doctors to finally turn off the machines. Kissing her son’s head, Lori holds her son’s cold hand until JR’s last bitter breath.

A few days later, at JR’s funeral, four hundred of JR’s friends from school and church come to mourn the young man’s life. JR’s youth pastor leads the ceremony, praising the person JR had been and delivering a beautiful eulogy that elicits many tears at the stoic, somber gathering.

But JR’s friends and family are not the only ones in attendance. The kids from school who had mocked and bullied JR sit in the back pew, holding their heads in their hands and crying softly. Keith, JR’s older brother, sits next to JR’s mother in the front row. The older brother is hit the hardest of all by the terrible tragedy, shackled by a hole of regret inside him.

The funeral lasts forty-five minutes. To Lori Gregory, though, it feels like forty-five lifetimes.

Lori’s husband would later tell Lori that she had only slept a total of twelve hours in the following twelve months.

The day after the funeral, as Lori sits in her living room watching the wall where her son used to hang his drawings of the stray animals he would adopt, Lori receives a call from the Davidson County Police Department.

That was the day everything changed. That was the day Lori learned the truth.

Lori, JR’s biological father, and JR’s stepfather, Daniel, sit in an empty conference room in the Nashville Metro Police Station. A young officer is sent in to deliver the report to the anxiously waiting family. The young man enters the room, takes one look at Lori’s face, and quickly turns away, as if he had just seen a ghost. The officer finally settles into a seat across from Lori at the other end of the table and clears his throat.

The young officer reads the report from the night of JR’s death. Lori listens patiently to the report until, suddenly, she hears something that sets her nerves on edge. Lori waits quietly, listening to the officer and waiting for the young man to finish.

After the officer finishes reading his report, Lori, her voice a breathless, chill whisper, asks, “You mean to tell me, Officer Roh, that the Greenbrire Fire Department, who was only a mile away from the crash site, got the call, too?”

Taken aback, the officer glances down at the report on the table in front of him. Flipping through the pages, the officer furrows his brow as he checks the facts. Finally, unable to look up and meet Lori’s eyes, he says, “Yes.”

Closing her eyes, Lori draws a deep breath before she asks her next question. “And you mean to tell me that… you… did not… let them respond?”

The officer swallows hard as if preparing for a speech. “Miss Gregory, if we had not sent our own Metro County ambulances to the scene, we would not have received tax dollars for the call. It would simply not have made fiscal sense for the department to let the smaller county handle the call.”

Unable to control herself any longer, Lori leaps across the table. Tackling the officer, Lori presses the young man up against the wall. Before she can wrap her hands around the young officer’s throat and squeeze, Daniel and James, JR’s father, pull her off the man.

For the next eight years of her life, Lori fights a drawn-out legal battle with Davidson County and the anonymous political machine that had murdered her son.

No one gives her any answers. No one answers any of her calls.

Lori and her husband lose everything in the good fight (their cars, their house, their 401Ks, everything.) When the Gregorys sued Davidson County, their attorneys proved to be con-men. The crooks took whatever money the Gregory’s had left, leaving them destitute and left to fight the good fight for justice alone.

One of the attorneys was disbarred. The other was jailed.

Three years after the death of her son, on Christmas Eve, Lori receives a knock at her front door. Answering the door, Lori finds in the white, snow-capped grass a young woman shivering. The young mother holds a baby girl in her arms wrapped in a brown blanket.

Holding the little girl out to Lori, the young mother standing on Lori’s doorstep tells Lori that she had seen Lori’s story on the news. The mother goes on to tell Lori that her daughter deserves a woman who will fight for her like Lori had fought for her son.

Lori never saw the mother again. Lori would later learn that the woman was a crack addict who killed herself several months later.

Today, the little girl shivering in the snow that evening is Lori’s daughter, her own little Christmas Miracle.

Eight years after JR’s premature death, on Lori’s birthday and the anniversary of her son’s death, the Gregory’s receive another knock on their front door.

The man at the door - Rudy - introduces himself as the first emergency responder to arrive at “the Ridge wreck” all those years ago.

The middle-aged EMT tells Lori how he had been off-duty the night of the wreck. He had stopped at the crash site as he had passed by to crawl into the burning car with JR before the other responders arrived. Rudy tells Lori, as he begins to break down on her doorstep, how he had never forgiven himself for letting JR die that day.

Composing himself, Rudy tells Lori that her son would have survived had help arrived sooner. He tells Lori that her son had died because he had remained stuck in the car upside-down for too long and had become brain-dead as a result. Apologizing through tears as he states the fact, Rudy tells Lori how he could have saved her son had help arrived sooner.

Rudy goes on to explain to Lori how he had been helpless to help that day due to a technicality in the law and that his superiors had ordered him to “stand down” and let the “father county” handle things.

Holding out his Fire Dept. badge to Lori, Rudy apologizes profusely as tears stream down his face. Turning, Rudy walks away, disappearing into the faded sunset. Behind his fading silhouette, the ruby shadow of Ridgetop, the gloomy grave in the red sunset that had taken her son’s life, looms over the man.

Eight years later, Lori Gregory still does not know the full story. She has not seen the EMT - Rudy - who had showed up at her door that day to testify to the truth.

Since then, hundreds across the United States have called Lori to tell her of their similar experiences due to an antiquated federal legislation called “Mutual Aid.”

Eight years later, Lori is still learning the full story of what happened that fateful day - her birthday - on the Ridge.

Lori has, however, learned that her son could have been saved.

Lori will not stop fighting the good fight until there is justice for JR and justice for all.