Six Years After Losing His Sight to An Arrow, Utah Man Goes on a Successful Deer Hunt

OREM, Utah — TJ Cartwright has never lost focus on what’s important. Since he was just a kid, that’s meant taking part in a family tradition.

“Oh yeah, I’ve been shooting bows since I was seven,” he said.

For him, the target range is basically a second home — but his first home is the great outdoors. Going back to when he was only 7 years old, Cartwright’s been obsessed with bowhunting.

He says it’s just something that’s been “passed down” from his dad to him —and his dad says the same thing about his father.

The point of all those trips out in the wilderness of Utah has never been in question.

“I don’t focus on killing something,” he said. “My biggest focus is on being with my family —relaxing, having fun, camping.”

We all have days we’ll never forget. For Cartwright, one of those is the day he lost sight of what he loved.

“I just kept saying ‘Dad, dad, dad, dad!'” Cartwright said, seemingly recalling every word.  And he said, “What, buddy?” And I said, “I can’t see. I’m blind. I can’t see nothing.”

That day changed everything — all because of a few steps in the wrong direction. As it turns out, what took Cartwright’s sight was the very thing he’d loved.

“I kind of made a mistake of stepping out in front of the person that was shooting,” he said. “They were following the deer, and the deer was coming from my right to my left.

They pulled the bow back and followed the deer, and then they saw me and panicked and shot, and it hit me in the face.”

Every moment is burned into his mind. The arrow had hit him right in the cheek, and help was nowhere to be seen. All Cartwright could do was imagine how his dad would handle the situation.

“My dad’s taught me a lot about survival,” he said. “The first thing that came into my head was ‘What would my dad do, what would my dad do?’  Well, my dad would get to a place where he would know that somebody would pick him up in an ambulance. So we walked across two mountainsides and got to the other side where there was a road. I just laid by the side of the road until the ambulance got there.”

Cartwright could still see. The last thing he remembers was being told he was going to lose consciousness.

“I could see all the way up until they put the trach in my throat,” he said. “They said ‘You’re going to be out for a minute,’ and I said ‘Okay.'”

Cartwright was put in a medically induced coma. He woke up two weeks later, and the world had gone dark.

“The strokes caused a blood clot in the back of my brain, and it sat on top of my optic nerve,” he said.

The news was enough to make even the strongest among us lose hope — but not Cartwright. He once thought his days of hunting were behind him, but now, it’s not uncommon to find him at the target range at Jakes Archery in Orem, typically with his dad or another family member helping him out.

On this day, Cartwright’s dad is helping him load and aim a crossbow, giving him instructions about when he’s loading an arrow, and how to adjust his aim. Leaning over Cartwright’s shoulder, he tells him to flip off the safety, and a few moments later, the sound of the arrow hitting its target is unmistakable.

“You can do whatever you want to, you just got to do it in a different way,” Cartwright said.

“Whatever you want to” included getting back out there — back out doing what he thought he never could. And now, six years after the accident that took his sight, Cartwright took down a deer, once again.

In a video provided by his family, Cartwright sits in the back seat of a truck, his dad behind the wheel. They come to a stop, and his dad sticks his fingers in his ears.

Moments later, the distinctive noise of a firing crossbow is heard, and several deer scatter. Cartwright yells a number of words that aren’t exactly suitable for print.

“They can see it, they can see me shoot it, and they can see everything, but I go off of sound,” he said. “I knew I hit him. And I was excited.”

Cartwright says it took a little research, but he learned of something called a “Phone Skope,” which allows him to connect a cell phone to the scope on his crossbow, making it easier for another person to give him a helping hand with his aim.

His hunting trip also involved a few applications to the state, but he soon knew there was nothing stopping him from continuing with the sport he loved.

“If you’re disabled, you can hunt with a crossbow on an archery hunt,” he said. “You can shoot from a vehicle, and hunt five days early.”

Nothing stood in his way — certainly not any amount of fear resulting from his accident.

“Yeah, that’s what a lot of people said,” Cartwright explained. “They’re like, ‘How can you still do it?’ And I’m like, ‘Accidents happen.’ Whatever happened to me was an accident, and I can’t look down on that. I just have to look forward to maybe inspiring other people, and helping other people know that just because you’re blind doesn’t mean that you can’t go out and do stuff.”

He refuses to let his injury define him. Last year, Cartwright met the woman who’s now his wife, and they’re now the proud parents of a baby girl.

He may not be able to see, but Cartwright hasn’t lost sight of life’s possibilities.

“I wasn’t supposed to be able to hunt anymore, and I still got up and got out and did it,” he said. “Oh, it’s an amazing feeling.  It’s awesome.”