Toddler Jaxon Taylor Walks Again After Surgery for Near-Fatal Skull-Spine Separation
Sixteen-month-old Jaxon Taylor was in the back seat in New South Wales, Australia, when the family car collided head-on with another vehicle at high speed in September 2015. The crash tore the ligaments that hold the skull and upper neck together. His top vertebrae were fractured and his head was pulled away from the spinal column — an injury often described in news reports as “internal decapitation” and treated as a severe occipitocervical or C1–C2 dissociation.
His mother, Rylea Taylor, pulled him from the wreck and knew his neck was broken. He was immobilized and airlifted to what was then Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital in Brisbane. Many children with this injury die at the scene or never breathe or move again. Jaxon’s spinal cord was bent but had not been cut.

Neurosurgeon and spinal specialist Geoff Askin led a six-hour operation. A custom halo brace was screwed into the skull to hold the head still. Under imaging and magnification, Askin realigned the bones millimeter by millimeter. Screws were too large for a toddler’s vertebrae, so the team used fine surgical wire. A segment of Jaxon’s own rib was grafted across the joint so the bones could fuse.
He woke up without paralysis. The halo vest kept the neck rigid for weeks while the graft healed. Within about two weeks he was smiling, eating and taking steps. His parents, Rylea and Andrew, called the outcome a miracle. Askin said it was the worst injury of his kind he had seen, and that Jaxon was extraordinarily lucky the cord still worked.
Follow-up reports described a child who walked, ran and played like a typical toddler once the halo came off.
Source: Contemporary reporting on Jaxon Taylor’s September 2015 surgery by Dr. Geoff Askin at Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital, Brisbane, including CBS News, SBS News, Seven Network / The Mirror, and Scientific American (“How Surgeons Reattached a Toddler’s Head”).