By Kathy Dixon
Farm Bureau News Editor

SCOTTSVILLE- John Nees was a safety-conscious, meticulous man.

"He was meticulous to a fault," said his daughter, Edna Marie Banton.

She invited her guests to examine her father's pickup trucks. Behind the seats were neatly stored boxes containing rags, tools, fire extinguishers and other necessities. Each box was built for the particular items stored in it.

"He was the type of person who considered every angle of everything before he made decisions," said Nees' wife, Edna. "He was very careful. The equipment was always housed; everything was always put back in its place."

Yes, despite Nees' orderly habits, he was killed in a tractor accident May 3.

"As meticulous as my father was, if he could have an accident, then anyone could," Mrs. Banton said.

And now the Nees family wants to do everything possible to find out exactly what caused the accident so other farmers can prevent the same thing from happening to them.

"We were as close as two people can be," said Edna Need, who was married to John for almost 41 years.

"I'll never live long enough to get over it," she said tearfully.

"I don't want anyone else to go through what I've gone through," she said after a pause, "I would encourage farmers to be very careful and make sure their equipment is in the best working condition it can be."

Nees was no stranger to the farming community. Although he worked for CSX for 31 years, he had been operating the farm for 46 years. And while at CSX, Nees worked as a brakeman, conductor, fireman, and engineer for both passenger and freight services, and never had an accident.

Nees' farm equipment was well maintained, but the tractor he was driving the day of his death hadn't been used in a while, Mrs. Nees said.

Mrs. Nees remembered talking to a mechanic who was a close friend of her husband's. The man offered Nees some used tires for the 1959 International Harvester McCormick Farmall, but Nees said he wanted new ones.

"'He always wanted to go first class' the man said to me," Mrs. Nees recalled. "Then he said, 'If John (Nees) came to may shop and I offered him a chair, he'd look first to make sure it had four legs before he'd sit down.'"

"That was just the way he was," Mrs. Nees said with conviction. "He was just so careful."

Nees had put one of the new tires on the tractor, but hadn't gotten around to putting on the other one. The old tire was a liquid ballast (filled with a mixture of antifreeze and water to give it added weight); the new one wasn't.

For some unexplained reason, Nees had taken the tractor out anyway and used it to pick up a large pile of brush. A front-end loader with bucket and prongs was already attached to the Farmall tractor.

Mrs. Nees had left the house at 7 a.m. to drive the school bus. When she returned around 11 a.m., she didn't receive a customary wave from the field and became a little anxious. But when Nees wasn't in the house at 11:30 a.m., her anxiety grew.

"That man was always in the house at 11:30 to watch Rush Limbaugh and eat his lunch," Mrs. Nees said. "When he wasn't in at 11:30, I knew something was wrong."

"I went and checked around the hill and saw the tractor turned over, "Mrs. Nees recalled softly. "I went over and kept praying he had been thrown off, but he was pinned under it."

"I checked him and he was already dead," said Mrs. Nees, who has worked for the local rescue squad for the past 20 years.

The cause of Nees' death was shock due to chest, neck and head injuries. Based on his wishes, no autopsy was performed.

But the circumstances kept nagging at Mrs. Nees, who just can't believe her husband would have driven a tractor with unbalanced tires unless there was something medically wrong with him.

So she enlisted the help of Virginia Farm Bureau Safety Coordinator Bruce Stone. And Stone asked two men who reconstruct accidents, Joe Atherton and Dr. William R. Krause, to help determine the accident's cause(s).

"If we can save one person from dying, or one wife from going through what Mrs. Nees has gone through, it's worth whatever effort it takes," Stone said.

The three men visited Mrs. Nees' farm, interviewed her and then examined and measured the tractor and the accident scene. They are currently in the process of determining the exact cause(s) of the accident.

"Mechanically, there's no question how it happened," Stone said. "But as meticulous as he was, you can't help wondering why.

"I guess what it goes to show you is that it doesn't matter how particular or thorough you are, farm accidents can happen to the best".

"Nobody, but nobody, is exempt from a farm accident," Stone added. "You have to constantly think about what could happen and be prepared to deal with it."