Bryan Schuler is one lucky little boy.
He’s the only survivor of a horrific wrong-way crash that claimed his mother, sister and his three favorite cousins on the Taconic Parkway in July, but despite the pain and loneliness, Bryan is actually thriving.
Not only is he back on his feet, he’s running.
“He’s in very good spirits, he loves going outside,” Thomas Ruskin, his family’s private investigator, told The Post. “He loves playing ball with his dad.”
Yesterday, Bryan and his father, Daniel Schuler, walked across the street from their West Babylon home to check out a kick-boxing game called Arcade Alley.
Bryan was smiling and excited to try the new game, which allows players to kick and punch various points on an inflated target.
Bryan is, of course, too young to understand what happened to his mother, Diane — that she drove the wrong way on the highway while drunk and high on marijuana.
And for that, he is lucky, too.
“He misses his mother and his sister terribly,” Ruskin said.
After spending months in the hospital with a broken leg, two broken arms and severe head trauma, the boy returned home with his father two months ago, said Ruskin, whose company, CMP Protective and Investigative Group, is looking into the circumstances of the crash.
Bryan is still undergoing physical and occupational therapy for his injuries, as well as psychological counseling.
He wears a patch over his left eye a few hours a day to rest it as part of the treatment for the head trauma. He does not appear to have lost sight in the eye, Ruskin said.
“He’s a very active 5-year-old,” Ruskin said.
For now, Bryan is being home-schooled, which eases the burden of continued therapy, he said.
Daniel Schuler has been able to take extended leave from his job as a public safety officer on Long Island thanks to his colleagues who have all donated their vacation and overtime hours to the cause.
Ruskin said Schuler has been overwhelmed by this generosity and haunted not only by the loss of his family, but of the three Yonkers men — Michael Bastardi, his son, Guy, and their friend Daniel Longo — who were in the SUV that his wife struck head-on.
“He praises them [his co-workers] and talks about the loss of Diane, the loss of his daughter, and the loss of the lives of the Bastardi and Longo families. He thinks about it every day,” Ruskin said.
Schuler expects to be able to stay out of work for at least several more weeks.
Although most of his time is spent trying to help Bryan be as “normal” a 5-year-old as possible, Schuler is also actively working to clear his wife Diane’s name.
The family had spoken about exhuming her body to conduct a second autopsy in an effort to show that some other physical ailment — aside from a chemical one — was to blame for her getting on the parkway in the wrong direction and crashing the minivan head-on into the Bastardis’ SUV.
As a result, Schuler has chosen to have a lab re-examine the tissue samples that were already taken, Ruskin said, adding that the family still believes the autopsy is wrong. They hope new testing will find that, Ruskin said. They still believe a tooth abscess may have somehow affected her brain, he added.
According to Ruskin, the lab has not provided the family an inventory of what tissues samples are available and whether or not there is brain tissue to examine, which could be useful in providing another explanation.
The family contends that Diane Schuler was a rational and sober woman, and that, suddenly, within the last hour of her life, she became irrational and confused, Ruskin said.
They believe that something else must have occurred that was missed in the initial autopsy.
The Schulers declined to comment about Bryan’s recovery or the case.
“She is not an alcoholic and my heart is restless every night when I go to bed,” Daniel Schuler told NBC last week. “Something medically had to have happened.”
Schuler’s blood-alcohol content was 0.19 – the equivalent of 10 drinks and more than twice the legal limit — and she also had marijuana in her system.
The Bastardi family has said it plans to file a civil lawsuit against the Schulers.
But right now, Schuler said he is focusing on raising his son.
“I promised my wife I will take care of my son the way she wanted me to,” he said last week. “That’s what I’m going to do.”