It was around 1am and I was woken by a loud crash. Still in a half asleep stupor, I wondered if I had dreamed it but I got up and went down to my front door. This was right in front of my house:

Except, the police hadn’t even arrived, yet. I’m a nurse, and I have seen some horrific things at work, but nothing ever scared me this much. This was the view from my front door.

I’ll never forget how creepy it felt as I walked over to check on the occupant(s). My heart was racing and my legs felt shaky. The airbags had deployed (obviously), so I couldn’t see inside. With a shaking hand, I pulled back what remained of the side airbag on the driver’s side and peered inside. I was expecting to see something that looked like it went through a meat grinder.. There was a teenager boy in the driver’s seat. His eyes were open and he was calmly staring straight ahead. I could see he was still breathing.

I held his hand and asked, “Are you feeling pain anywhere?” He looked at me and his face was completely intact, though his nose was bleeding. He said, “Yes. Can you please call my mom? I don’t know where my phone is. She’s worried.”

My phone was in the house but my neighbor had his. I asked the kid for his mother’s number and repeated them to the neighbor. After six numbers, the kid shut his eyes, his hand went limp and stopped talking, so we weren’t able to call her.

The car in the above photo had been an Acura SUV.

I checked on the other car, and it was a middle aged woman in a Dodge Durango. She was conscious and had a broken ankle and probably some broken ribs and a neck injury. The impact of the crash had snapped the back of the driver’s seat and she was flung into the back of the vehicle (she had been driving with the back seat folded down, I think.

By then, emergency personnel had arrived, so I let them take over. That’s when I went inside and snapped the above photo.

Here’s a photo of vehicle #2. The front of the house in the background is mine. I have a 14″ stone retaining wall in front and if it was not there, this vehicle would have ended up coming into the front of the house. The rear axle of the vehicle had snapped from the impact of hitting that wall.

A witness, who had been driving southbound behind vehicle #1, said there was a slow moving vehicle ahead. The kid got impatient and swerved into the northbound side, to pass, and collided head-on with #2.

It took the fire department over an hour to cut this kid out of the vehicle.

A few days later, the kid’s mother was walking around in front of my house, with tears rolling down her face. I went out there and asked if she was okay. She introduced herself and I asked if he was okay. She said his leg was pretty mangled and he had a ruptured spleen, but he was going to be fine. She told me that he has cystic fibrosis and was wearing a chest brace that saved his life. The surgeon who worked on his spleen told her the brace likely saved his chest from being crushed.

I explained about him asking me to call but losing consciousness before I got her number. She said he remembered me and had asked if I the lady called her. She asked what lady and he said the one that was holding my hand when I had the accident. She thought he was delirious. She hugged me.

She told me it was her car and she had asked him to fill the gas tank for her, around 12:30. He had stopped at Taco Bell before getting gas and was heading home. She got nervous when he was gone for an hour and asked her older son to drive her around to look for him. They had driven past the scene of the accident and didn’t even recognize her car. She said she was praying whoever had that crash was alive. After driving around for more than an hour, her son stopped at the accident scene to ask a cop if they’d had any other accident reports in the area. The cop asked him what kind of car and he told them. He asked if he knew the license plate number so he asked his mother and she handed him her registration card. The cop walked over to the back of the vehicle then told them that was her car and the hospital where they had taken him.

Luckily, nobody died in this horrific accident. It could have been much worse.