2026 Rosen & Ohr Scholarship Winner

by Jerrad Ohr | Firm News, Scholarship

We are proud to announce that Davis Treese has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Rosen & Ohr Scholarship. His essay, “The Cost of a Few Minutes,” stood out for its honesty and resilience, and for the perspective he carries out of a serious accident into his future in construction management.

The Cost of a Few Minutes

By Davis Treese

I got the call from Haselden Construction two days after the crash.

They were offering me the summer job for $22 an hour, on an actual construction site, the exact experience a 16-year-old needed to get into the Construction Management program at Colorado State University. I’d interviewed for that job the week before the accident, and I wanted it more than almost anything that summer.

I had to turn it down.

I couldn’t do the physical work, and I could not lift my head enough to watch for the cranes and other safety issues. My neck and back were bad enough that my parents and I agreed it wasn’t safe, and I knew they were right. I also turned down a second offer from Discount Tire the same week. Between the two jobs, I walked away from over $11,000 in income that I had planned to save to pay for college.

That phone call is the moment I keep coming back to. Not the crash itself. Not the emergency room. Just sitting there knowing I earned something and couldn’t take it.

Here’s what happened. In June of 2023, two months after turning 16, I was turning onto a boulevard separated by a median when another driver decided to drive on the wrong side of the separated road, just to avoid backed-up traffic. I had just pulled out of a side street when she hit me head-on. A witness pulled over afterward and told me he saw everything, that she had crossed into oncoming traffic on purpose to get around the traffic.

She didn’t want to wait a few minutes.

I checked on her and her daughter first to make sure they were okay. Then I noticed my hands were shaking, I was getting dizzy, and pain was building in my neck and back. She convinced me not to call 911. It was my first accident, and she was the adult, so I listened. I placed the broken bumper and fender into my car and drove, wobbling, the short distance to my job and tried to work. I couldn’t make it through my shift, and my boss told me to go home.

That night I couldn’t sleep. The next morning, my girlfriend Abby drove me to the emergency room because my pupils were dilated and I wasn’t acting like myself. I was diagnosed with a concussion and told to rest for a week. That week stretched into years of symptoms that have still never been fully resolved.

The headaches came and stayed. At first, they were almost constant. Two years later, they still show up multiple times a week. When they’re bad enough, I lie down on the floor in a dark room until they pass. The neck pain disrupts my sleep almost every night. I wake up, adjust, try to get comfortable, and do it again. I rarely feel rested. That affects everything: focus, mood, school, and my ability to work.

Those aren’t things you can explain easily to someone who hasn’t lived with them. They’re invisible. From the outside, I looked fine. From the inside, nothing felt the same.

The crash changed me in ways that went beyond physical. I became irritable and withdrawn in ways I’d never been before. Abby and I had been together for two years, and we broke up within two weeks of the accident because I wasn’t the same person anymore. I moved my stuff into the unfinished basement of our house just to be away from everyone.

One night in late June, I got a fifth of whiskey and sat alone in a park. Crying, I called a suicide hotline. I wasn’t planning to. I was just in a place I didn’t know how to get out of. They helped me calm down, and I called my friend Tyler to come to get me. It scared my whole family. It scared me.

I started therapy, which helped. But the hard moments kept coming. In October, I found out I wasn’t going to be cleared to wrestle my senior year because of my ongoing concussion symptoms. That night, I punched a concrete wall and fractured my hand. I have permanent surgical hardware in my right hand now, which is something I think about frequently, given that I intend to spend my career in construction.

My grades dropped across my junior and senior years because of the concussion. Focusing and reading were harder than they had ever been. I had unofficially received extra time from some teachers, which helped, but the damage to my academic record was done. I had planned for years to go directly into CSU’s Construction Management program. Because of where my grades ended up, I started at Front Range Community College instead and am transferring to CSU this fall.

That’s still the plan. Just longer now.

My medical expenses from the accident have exceeded $44,000. I will need ongoing treatment, injections, physical therapy, and regular care, to manage chronic neck pain that my doctors have told me is permanent and may worsen as I get older. I am financing my education through part-time work, scholarships, and student loans. Because of my physical limitations, I have to be careful about how much I take on at once, which means every scholarship I receive directly affects what I’m able to do.

Here’s what I want to say clearly, because I think it matters for this particular scholarship:

I didn’t almost die that June. But I’ve spent three years learning something that I think is more important than surviving a dramatic moment. I’ve learned what it really costs when someone makes a reckless decision, and someone else absorbs the consequences.

The driver who hit me tried to save a few minutes by crossing the median. What that choice cost me was years of my childhood, $11,000 in lost wages, $44,000 in medical bills, a girlfriend, a wrestling season, a direct path to CSU, and two years of pain that my doctors tell me isn’t going away soon.

I’m going into construction management, where decisions about safety affect everyone on a job site. The person who cuts a corner doesn’t just risk themselves; they put the whole crew at risk. I understand that differently than most 19-year-olds, because I’ve lived what it means to pay for someone else’s bad decision. I won’t be that person. And when I’m in a position to influence a job’s safety culture, I’ll make sure the people around me aren’t either.

The Rosen & Ohr Scholarship would help reduce the financial weight this accident left behind and allow me to focus on building what I’ve been working toward my whole life.

I earned that job at Haselden. I’m still going to get there, just later than I planned, with a clearer understanding of why the work matters.

Congratulations, Davis! Your story is a reminder that the choices people make behind the wheel carry real weight, and that resilience can turn a hard setback into a sense of purpose. We wish you the best as you transfer to Colorado State and build the career you have worked toward.