For 20 minutes, in his hospital bed, Kyle Weaver sputtered out the same two sentences. Doctors told him he was perseverating. Caught in a shock loop. He had no real memory, then, of the crash that put him there.
“What happened?” he asked. Again. And again.
“Is everyone OK?” he asked. Again. And again.
In the weeks to come, the pieces filtered back in. He remembered waking up inside a nightmare, the winter night Grand Junction’s Central High wrestling team was supposed to be just taking a brief ride back from Buffalo Wild Wings to its hotel. He remembered the blaring of a bus alarm rattling his ears, and fluorescent light searing his eyes, and his leg throbbing. He remembered seeing Central teammate Cruz Moncada lying on the floor of their bus, spitting up blood.
Then Weaver remembered blacking out, again, from a December crash that put nearly every one of his teammates in days and weeks-long stints in hospitals around Colorado.
“I’ve seen quite a bit,” said head coach Clint Trujillo, a man with a salt-and-pepper beard who’s spent 29 years coaching at Central.
“Nothing quite like this,” Trujillo continued. “Ever.”
This weekend, the Central Warriors have returned to Denver to compete for a boys title in Class 5A at the Colorado high school state wrestling tournament, despite fielding a lineup that is utterly unequipped to do so. In recent years, Trujillo has overseen the rise of a feeder program — the Little Warriors Wrestling Club — that promises a potential Colorado powerhouse in Grand Junction. His Central team demanded to him they shorten their time off at the beginning of the school year, and came into the 2025-26 season convinced they could finish top-five in the state at Ball Arena this weekend, senior Micah Bautista said.
Then an SUV slammed into the side of their team bus in Lakewood, killing an 18-year-old passenger in the SUV and severely injuring most of the young wrestlers on the bus.
“We never had an opportunity to be at our full potential,” Trujillo reflected. “And we’ll never see, kinda, what we could’ve done.”
Grand Junction Central’s Micah Bautista, left, wrestles Loveland’s Dominik Ortiz during a preliminary Class 5A 120-pound match during the first day of the 2026 Colorado High School State Wrestling Championships on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, at Ball Arena in Denver. (Photo by Timothy Hurst/The Denver Post)What was lost in the crash
And still, less than three months later, Weaver smiled with pride Thursday before he ever took a mat. He’d made it here, qualifying in the boys’ 157 weight class. So did three other Central High teammates — Bautista (120 pounds), Elijah Hernandez (144 pounds), and Tristan Valdez (285 pounds) — through a season so decimated by sudden tragedy that Trujillo has had to cobble together a roster of mostly junior-varsity wrestlers for the past month.
It has fostered a bond, Weaver reflected, for the future of the program. But there is also the present.
“Obviously, I want to medal,” Weaver said. “But I can’t stop thinking about how much cooler it’d be to be the guy who won state after he was in a bus crash.”
On Thursday afternoon, when asked how many of his teammates aren’t wrestling at Ball Arena this weekend but could’ve been, Bautista pursed his lips and began ticking off a list on his fingers.
One. Two.
Two of Central High’s varsity wrestlers are still injured badly enough that they couldn’t make the trip down for state.
Three. Four.
Two more — sophomore Justice Espinoza and senior Moncada — came down to support their teammates, but were never able to make it back to a mat after the crash.
Grand Junction Central’s Kyle Weaver leaves the floor after being pinned by Legend’s Seth Nugent in a preliminary class 5A 157-pound bout on the first day of the 2026 Colorado High School State Wrestling Championships on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, at Ball Arena in Denver. (Photo by Timothy Hurst/The Denver Post)“It’s kinda like a little voice in my head that tells me, ‘Dang, I’ve lost so much,'” said Moncada, who narrowly missed the state championships last year after a fifth-place finish in regionals.
“I was supposed to be a part of it,” Moncada continued. “Not just there just to watch it. I was supposed to be in it.”
On Thursday, sitting inside the lobby of their team hotel in Denver, Moncada took off a Bass Pro Shops cap to show the top of his head. A thin scar canal snaked between a thicket of black hair, looping from one ear to the other across 57 individual staples of skin. His eye socket was smashed in on impact, when the SUV hit. Doctors installed three plates around his nose, and he woke up in the hospital that night with his jaw wired shut.
“It was a bit of a surprise,” he smiled softly, a few months later. “That’s for sure.”
When they got on the bus, after watching a night of UFC fights at that Buffalo Wild Wings, Bautista sat in the second-to-last seat on the right. Shortly after departing, they turned left from Kipling Street onto West Sixth Avenue in Lakewood. Bautista felt one impact — clapping his hands, in recounting — and then a boom.
The senior wrestler flew out of the rearview window, and rolled about 25 feet away on the pavement, he estimated. Bautista saw one teammate hanging halfway out of the window of the bus, unconscious. He saw another teammate lying on the side of the road, and helped pick him up and pull him back by the bus. He remembers crying. He remembers yelling.
And he remembers seeing the bus, caved in around the third-to-last seat from the right.
“I’m pretty convinced that like, if I was sitting a seat ahead of me,” Bautista said, “I very easily could not be here right now, and not doing any of this.”
Bautista went to the hospital that night, after pulling a shard of glass out of his back. Weaver, a junior, was down for weeks with a concussion. Espinoza, a sophomore, had two surgeries on his spleen. Trujillo spent three days after the crash sitting in hospital rooms across Colorado and talking with parents, sleeping little and eating less.
Grand Junction Central’s Micah Bautista locks in before a preliminary match against Loveland’s Dominik Ortiz in the class 5A 120 pound bracket during the first day of the 2026 Colorado High School State Wrestling Championships on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, at Ball Arena in Denver. (Photo by Timothy Hurst/The Denver Post)Making it to Denver
There was a “little bit” of weight as the season moved forward, as Trujillo reflected.
“Been a little bit of weight … this whole damn season,” Trujillo muttered.
At a meet at the end of January where Central struggled heavily, Trujillo had one varsity wrestler left in his lineup. He sat his roster down in the locker room afterwards. He explained the schedule was built for a different team. He also explained they couldn’t be content with their current level of effort, and they needed to refocus.
A few weeks later, they assembled in their hotel room in Denver a couple of hours before state championships, with Trujillo grateful they all were even alive.
“It’s just a bond that you can’t get rid of,” Weaver said. “Because you just know – you just know. You understand each other, and you understand what they each went through.”
Bautista’s first-round matchup Thursday ended in ultimate disappointment, falling to Loveland’s Dominik Ortiz 18-2 by technical fall. Still, he affirmed after the match, gasping for breath: he was simply happy to be there.
“I guess,” Weaver smiled Thursday afternoon, “wrestlers are tough.”
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