Mission Moment: A Mother's Mission Becomes a Movement

When Clark Jacobs was in second grade, he picked up the obvious nickname of Superman. But at age 20, he truly began to live up to superhero status. As a second-year mechanical engineering student at Georgia Tech in 2015, a sleeping Clark fell out of his loft bed in the Kappa Sigma fraternity house and landed on the back of his head. 

He doesn’t remember the accident — or the two months leading up to it and the five or six months after it. His first memory is of physical therapy at Shepherd Center. 

“I knew what I had to do to get my life back,” Clark says now, a decade later. “I had this dream of waking up in my frat house, walking across campus, hanging out with my buddies—just having my college life back. This fueled an unbelievable fire inside me. I always knew I was going to make it back,” he says. “I never let myself begin to think otherwise.” 

In 2020, Clark at last had his chance to make it back—he walked across the stage and received his diploma from Georgia Tech. “It was pretty awesome,” he says. “I felt like I was a superstar.” 

“He is a miracle,” says his mother, Mariellen Jacobs. Any proud mother might say that, but in fact, Clark’s survival story has prompted changes that make every college student in Georgia safer. “Clark’s accident happened so quickly, and it was something I had never thought about—the danger of falling out of elevated beds,” Mariellen says. “But I thought, ‘Surely, this is not the only time this has ever happened.’” 

And so, as Clark began his recovery, Mariellen started gathering facts and reaching out to other parents, eventually forming a nonprofit organization called Rail Against the Danger. The group’s rallying cry: “Do you think you’re too old for a safety rail? Don’t fall for that.”  

Mariellen’s background in graphic design and marketing helped her channel her anguish into activism, as Rail Against the Danger began advocating with the University System of Georgia to install safety rails on all loft and bunk beds in campus housing. After a few years of lobbying and many iterations, the new rule was put in place in the fall of 2019. 

Rail Against the Danger attracted the attention of Nanette Hausman, mother of a college student who died after a tragic skateboarding accident in Colorado. Along with several other parents who had lost their children to preventable accidents on campuses across the country, Mariellen and Nanette, who has since passed away, created the College Safety Coalition, which works on legislation to hold schools more accountable and transparent about campus safety. 

“Alana Shepherd was a key element in giving me the courage and the strength to really pursue Rail Against the Danger,” says Mariellen, who since 2019 has worked in Shepherd Center’s Peer Support Program. “She told me, ‘Knock down every door and don’t take “no” for an answer.’ . . . Just look at what Alana has done. She helped start Shepherd Center and now it’s two gigantic new buildings and 50 years of advocacy. You start somewhere, and you just keep going. Anything is possible if you just keep going.” 

Written by Teresa Weaver

This story is an excerpt from “Mission Moments: 50 Years of Rebuilding Lives One Moment at a Time,” a book celebrating Shepherd’s 50th anniversary in 2025.