Bloomington girl who died from strep honored for her spirit, character

Twin sisters River, left, and Rose Kunkes, right, both 7, at the Festival of Trees in November 2022. Both received blue ribbons for tree designs.

BLOOMINGTON — On a quiet and sunny Sunday afternoon, more than 100 Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts and Scout leaders jammed into Bloomington's Second Presbyterian Church for a special award ceremony.

On May 21, Rose Tylor Kunkes, 7, of Cub Scout Pack 3905, was awarded the Spirit of the Eagle.

But Rose wasn't there.

A portrait of the late Rose Kunkes, 7, at a ceremony Sunday, May 21, where she was posthumously awarded the Spirit of the Eagle by the Boy Scouts of America at Bloomington's Second Presbyterian Church.

The Spirit of the Eagle is presented to the families of Scouts who have died early in life.

Rose's family — her father Nick, mother Teresa, 14-year-old brother Jonathan and 7-year-old twin sister River — received the award in her stead.

The family printed T-shirts with Rose's face on them and handed out bags and badges with Rose's motto on them: "Do your best! Be you."

Choking on tears, mixing grief and gratitude for the Scouting community, her father asked everyone in the room to "take her with you."

River Kunkes, 7, holds the Spirit of the Eagle award meant for her twin sister, Rose. The award is given posthumously to those the Boy Scouts of America believes would have gone on to become Eagle Scouts.

The Friday before the ceremony, the Kunkes family sat at their dining room table in Bloomington, remembering Rose.

As they described their daughter to a reporter, Rose's mother was pressing T-shirts, and her father was helping River fill giveaway bags for the ceremony. Jonathan hadn't come home from school yet.

There was a static silence, a thread far too bare, yet still holding together.

Rose's parents recounted how she had gotten sick in January with a common childhood illness, strep throat.

"Just normal kid stuff," her father said.

Teresa Kunkes said they took her to the doctor, got antibiotics, and things went back to normal.

Then, on Feb. 19, Rose started feeling sick again.

Rose's father said she presented the same symptoms of strep throat: "She was kind of lethargic, just kind of laying around."

The following Monday, the Kunkeses took Rose back to the doctor, where she got another strep diagnosis and stronger antibiotics. They assumed everything would be fine.

Twin sisters River, left, and Rose Kunkes, right, both 7, at the 2022 Labor Day Parade in downtown Bloomington.

But she had a rough night, and by the following morning, Rose was dehydrated and needed to go to the emergency room.

"They'll just hook her up to an IV at the ER," Nick Kunkes recalled thinking.

His wife finished the thought: "We'll be home in a couple of hours, and everything will be fine."

However, Nick Kunkes said, as soon as the doctors started treating his daughter at OSF HealthCare St. Joseph Medical Center in Bloomington, "They immediately knew, they immediately said she had toxic shock syndrome from the strep, and that her body was shutting down."

Sobbing, Teresa Kunkes recounted how the doctors wanted to airlift Rose to a larger facility, OSF St. Francis in Peoria, and put her on oxygen.

"She was talking the whole time ... 'Mom, don't leave me. I don't want to go on the flight by myself,'" she said.

Teresa Kunkes said Rose's oxygen was being administered through nasal cannula, a pair of tubes inserted into the nose.

7-year-old twins Rose, left, and River Kunkes, right, holding wooden signs they made for the Boy Scouts of America in January.

"She kept saying, 'Mom, it hurts, and I don't want to wear it,'" she said.

Then, she said, the doctors decided to sedate Rose so she could be intubated.

"They were ready to do the X-ray to make sure the tube was in place," she said. The doctors asked her to leave the room.

Seated at the dining room table, Nick Kunkes's eyes were raw, cheeks flooded with tears; River had stepped away for a moment.

Wracked by emotions, Rose's mother said next, "As soon as I came out, then she coded."

Rose's heart had stopped.

Dr. Aaron Traeger is a seasoned pediatrician at Carle BroMenn Medical Center in Normal.

"Strep is a bacterial infection that you get from the community," he said. "It's out in the environment."

Traeger said strep throat is transferred through close contact: people sharing drinks, breathing on each other.

Dr. Aaron Traeger, pediatrician for Carle BroMenn HealthCare.

"Normally, what it is, is it's a sore throat, some headaches, some belly aches. Things like that," he said.

It's what most parents, like Rose's, would classify as "normal kid stuff."

Traeger said strep, like the flu and the common cold, comes and goes in waves.

"We know that there are typically peaks of this thing," he said. "And it seems like last year, and the data does support this, that strep came and it stuck around a lot longer."

While there are a plethora of vaccines available for a myriad of diseases, there isn't one for strep, and the best way to prevent it is to wash your hands and stay distanced from sick people.

"Strep is caused by a bacteria that there is not a vaccine for," Traeger said. "We have lots of vaccines that protect against other types of bacteria, but there is not one that has been effective in preventing (the bacteria) that we commonly see that causes strep throat."

He said, normally, when patients present with symptoms of strep throat, "you come in to the doctor. We'll check you out, take a look at you and see what's going on. If the test is positive for the bacteria, then we give you some antibiotics, and that usually takes care of it."

That's exactly what the Kunkeses did.

However, Traeger said, "There are some percentage of patients, and this is an incredibly small number of people, where things get worse."

He said the sore throat can get worse, it can become difficult to talk and the fever doesn't break.

That's when "it's time to escalate care," Traeger said. "That's when it's time to seek back with your physician, or present to the emergency department.

"But, again, this is a really uncommon thing."

Matt Sheehan, a media relations coordinator with OSF HealthCare, wrote an article in March about the potential severity of strep throat.

In fact, OSF published the article because of the severity of strep cases this year and partially in response to Rose's death.

"Dr. Brian Curtis, vice president of the clinical specialty services at OSF HealthCare, says the throat isn't the only place to keep an eye on when looking for strep infection," Sheehan wrote.

"'Group A strep can also cause skin infections," Curtis says. "It can cause necrotizing fasciitis (where the body's soft tissue, like muscle, dies) and then it can also cause an erysipelas, which are very fast-spreading skin and soft tissue infections which people can get very sick very quickly from."'

The Mayo Clinic advises these tips to prevent strep infection:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such severe cases are called "invasive group A strep (iGas) infections."

Per the CDC, "Invasive disease means that germs invade parts of the body that are normally free from germs. When this happens, disease is usually very severe, requiring care in a hospital and even causing death in some cases. Necrotizing fasciitis and streptococcal toxic shock syndrome are examples of iGAS infections."

Rose's parents said that may be what happened to their daughter.

The number of invasive infections decreased during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the CDC.

Jonathan, 14, and 7-year-old twins Rose, left, and River Kunkes, right, during the 2022 Christmas season.

Traeger said that may be because of behavioral changes in the general population — like masking, social distancing and increased hand-washing.

Now that those practices have been relaxed, Traeger stressed that the best way to avoid infection is preventative care.

"The best things that you can do are really hand-washing and staying away from sick people, and you staying away when you're sick as well," he said. "But the hand-washing is crazy effective."

Back at the St. Joe's ER, Rose was stabilized after her heart stopped, but her mother said that took nearly 20 minutes.

She said the team needed to rush Rose to Peoria, where she would be put on an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) machine, which pumps blood outside of the body to a machine that removes carbon dioxide and sends the blood back to the body filled with oxygen.

"The ECMO would basically be her life support," Teresa Kunkes said. "And it would do everything for her so that all of her could heal."

Rose was flown to the hospital in Peoria, where she was given a room with an ECMO machine. Unfortunately, Rose's parents said, that wasn't enough.

Rose's family was told that her heart had stopped again on the helicopter.

Doctors were able to stabilize her again, but that wasn't the worst of it.

Eventually, the family was told, "The strep had invaded her body," Rose's mother said. "For whatever reason, we're still trying to find out, her body couldn't handle the way it was attacking her."

Teresa Kunkes said doctors told her that, instead of Rose's white blood cells attacking the disease, "they started throwing blood clots at it. And so, they weren't actually fighting it, they were basically helping it.

"And it was shutting down her body faster."

The Kunkeses said they have trouble remembering the first year they had with Rose and her sister, River.

They said everything was doubled when they had twins, trying to get one baby to sleep just in time for the other to wake up.

They'd already had one child, Jonathan, who was involved with Cub Scouts, and their day jobs also kept them busy.

But, despite the challenges, they said Rose was "amazing."

"She didn't care what other people thought of her," her father said. "She did whatever she wanted to, pretty much whenever. Made her a challenging kid to raise," he chuckled.

"But you couldn't help but be proud of her."

They said Rose was an inventor and a creator. One time, Rose didn't like that her dollhouse had a bath tub, they said.

"She thought they should have a shower," her mother said, scrolling through photos on her phone.

"She took a McDonald's cup, and she cut the bottom out of it. And then, she took cardboard and she folded it for the sides. Then she used a toothpick and (her father) helped her sew a piece of ribbon. And that became the shower curtain."

Nick Kunkes said his daughter tended to be more interested in creating stories than reading them. When other kids were buying story books, Rose was buying blank pages.

"It never failed — book fair time, she would get a journal. She would get two journals," Nick Kunkes laughed, face still stung red with emotion.

"She made me a book," her mother said. "Her favorite thing would always be to get paper out of the printer, staple it together and make it into a book."

That book, safely tucked away inside the Kunkes' family home, is about a princess, Rose's mother said.

"It was the most amazing book ever ... I think she just wanted to tell her own story, and she didn't care what anybody else thought."

Nick Kunkes said his daughter, always the "biggest presence" in the room, was "unapologetically herself."

Rose's condition in Peoria was so critical, her father said, "She was going to lose her arms and her legs if she would have survived. They turned black."

Unbelievably, the news got worse.

"They finally got her stable enough to take her to a CT scan," her father said, his voice trailing to a whisper. "And that's when we found out that she wasn't there anymore."

"She was brain dead from coding in Bloomington," her mother said.

A silence like a heavy blanket covered the family dining room.

"They did everything," she said. "They were amazing in Peoria, and they were amazing here ... I think they just weren't equipped to handle it.

"They told us that she wasn't going to come back. So her life would have been on a machine, and that would have been it. And, if the machine failed, or when the battery died on the machine, they didn't know if she would be able to stand being moved to a new machine."

Rose's father said, "And the machine had already been past all its safety limits."

His wife said, "It was about ready to fail."

Having to make an unthinkable choice, a choice no parent should have to make, they decided to let their daughter die.

"We let them give her the morphine and take her out slowly," her mother said. "And then, that was it.

"And so, on the 23rd, we had to say goodbye to our baby girl who was healthy and fine on Monday, and instantly not."

Ben Blumenberg is the Scout executive for the Boy Scouts of America's W.D. Boyce Council, which covers much of Central Illinois.

He oversees all Scout activities for the area, including Cub Scout Pack 3905, Rose's and River's group.

He said the Spirit of the Eagle, while certainly offering some comfort and closure to a grieving family, is meant for Scouts they believe would have succeeded at the highest level.

Rose Kunkes' Cub Scouts uniform on display Sunday, May 21, at Bloomington's Second Presbyterian Church. She was posthumously awarded the Spirit of the Eagle by the Boy Scouts of America.

"When a young person embodies that Scout Oath and Scout Law, like Rose did, we know they've got the right character," he said.

"Rose had the right level of perseverance and commitment that we believe there's no way, there's no way she wouldn't have become an Eagle Scout," Blumenberg said.

Eagle Scout is the highest rank in the Scouts.

Famous Eagle Scouts include news anchor Walter Cronkite, baseball hall-of-famer Hank Aaron and the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong.

"In Rose's case, she had all of that character mix, but she did it with her own flair," Blumenberg said.

"Rose had the right level of perseverance and commitment that we believe there's no way, there's no way she wouldn't have become an Eagle Scout."

—Ben Blumenberg, Scout executive, W.D. Boyce Council

Rose's parents said, with all that flair and her unique character, Rose loved helping people, going so far as to create a "gang" of kids on scooters, roaming the neighborhood and helping people with little things here and there.

"Rose loved service," her father said. "That was one of her favorite things to do."

But, he said, "she was more of a foreman kind of person."

Rose's mother said, "She would love to be there to help, but her help was talking to everyone and telling them what to do ... she loved to visit and tell stories and entertain everyone."

Some time after their daughter died, the Kunkeses were going through Rose's desk.

"They (the Scouts) had a day where it was, right around Valentine's Day, write a note to yourself and send yourself a Valentine," her mother said.

"The Cub Scout Motto is 'Do your best.' We've said it so many times and we try to engrain that in everybody ... we found this note in her desk," she said, laying out a heart-shaped piece of paper with Rose's handwriting.

"This was supposed to be a note to yourself," her father said.

A note that Rose Kunkes, 7, wrote to herself on Valentine's Day. Her parents found this note, which became a slogan of sorts, after Rose died from complications with strep throat in February.

It reads, "Do your best! Be you."

Rose's mother said, "When we found that note, we were just in awe of how much she loved it and lived it."

That's when they decided seek the Spirit of the Eagle award for Rose.

So, they prepared a presentation for the next Scout leader meeting.

Nick Kunkes said, "We were ready to present, and we waited for all of the rest of the business ... " he paused, emotions rising to the surface once more, "They stopped us in the middle of our presentation and said, 'It was already done.'"

In his interview, Blumenberg said he had been preparing to reach out to Meghan Hillebrandt, a pack leader for Rose's Scout pack, about getting the Spirit of the Eagle for Rose.

"I said, 'Hey, the Boy Scouts has this award. If it's something that you feel like the Kunkes family would appreciate, then we'll absolutely do it, just let me know.'

"And, at the same time, they (the pack leaders) were looking at, 'How do we (apply for the Spirit of the Eagle)?'" Blumenberg said.

He said the Scouts group, all the packs and troops, have been "exceptional at supporting the Kunkes family, and modeling exactly what we would expect Scouters to do, and the Scouting family to do."

On May 21, with warm sunlight pouring in through the windows, Blumenberg stood in front of over 100 Scouts and their families and presented the Kunkes family with Rose's award.

Then, he gave out pins to each one of them. In an Eagle Scout ceremony, the parents are awarded their own pins, the mother and father pins, and the Scout's mentor gets one as well.

Jonathan Kunkes, 14, receives an Eagle Scout mentor pin as part of the May 21 Spirit of the Eagle ceremony at Bloomington's Second Presbyterian Church. His sister Rose, 7, received the award posthumously, and it is meant for those who would have gone on to become Eagle Scouts.

Blumenberg chose to pin two people who, he believes, would have undoubtedly been Rose's mentors: her brother Jonathan, and her twin sister River.

That Friday in the Kunkes' dining room, after Jonathan got home from school, he sat at the end of the table, fiddling with a cup.

His parents sat on either side, reminiscing about Rose's guitar that she never quite learned how to play.

Jonathan was the first one in Scouts. He's been the big brother, watching his sisters grow. But now, he said, it's different.

"It was rough, at first, having to deal with the loss of my sister. Because I've been with her for seven years of my life," he said, composing his thoughts.

"She was an awesome sister. I miss her, but now I've ... I still miss her, but I've learned to, I guess, like, go through the house without her."

His father said the extended family has to adjust, too. He said this past Christmas, they finally started seeing the twins as "two different people."

"(Rose) would focus on unicorns and rainbows, and (River) would focus on Mario and Pokémon," he said.

His wife said, "I think the hardest part now is that things are too easy. Things have never been easy, two babies and two toddlers."

Luckily, though, they've got some help.

River Kunkes, 7, is pictured in the family's Bloomington home.

Throughout the afternoon, River took plenty of time showing off her sister's Pinewood Derby cars, some of her inventions for their cat, and all of the dollhouses they gave Rose over the years, including some that aren't finished.

She explained how Rose would beg to borrow her toys for the dollhouses, how they just needed more characters.

Their mother said, "She's (River) a very strong girl, to deal with what she's dealt with. Most of the time I feel like she's probably stronger than us."

She called River their "rock."

Without missing a beat, River explained what she does best.

"I learned in school that water can make cracks in rocks and concrete and stuff," River said. "Let's say you had a rock, and you got cracks. I would just heal you up and make you in one piece again."

According to the Mayo Clinic's guidance on strep throat, call your doctor if you or your child has any of these signs and symptoms:

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State Sen. Tom Bennett, R-Gibson City, talks to parade attendees on Monday in downtown Bloomington. Bennett represents the 53rd District, Bureau, Ford, Grundy, Iroquois, LaSalle, Livingston, Marshall, McLean, Peoria, Putnam, Tazewell, Will, and Woodford counties.

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The Bloomington High School Marching Band performed the Battle Hymn of the Republic in the 2023 Memorial Day parade on Monday, May 29 near Miller Park in Bloomington.

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American Legion Honor Guard member David Brown is among those who attended the Memorial Day ceremony Monday at Miller Park.

Contact D. Jack Alkire at (309)820-3275.

Twitter: @d_jack_alkire

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Mid-thirties. Multi-media journalist at the Pantagraph in Bloomington, IL. US Navy veteran.

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