Another blog written in
Minnesota: I left Atlanta on Good Friday to drive up to Minnesota. As I was
driving on I-24 headed west, I saw an orange road construction sign that said Prepare to Stop. I didn't think I'd have
to, though, because it was the Friday before Easter and the Department of
Transportation had to realize there'd be traffic for the holiday. Surely,
they'd suspended the work for the weekend.
And then not too much farther up
ahead, traffic came to a stop. It was around 12:40 in the afternoon. As we
inched along, I cursed the DOT for having road work going on, but as the time
dragged out and we still were only creeping forward, I turned on the radio and
started scanning for a traffic report. There was nothing.
At one point, I came on a three
car accident. Someone had rear-ended another car and sent them into a third. I
had to go around them, but that wasn't what had traffic backed up. It took 50
minutes in stop and go traffic before I saw why no one was moving.
On the other side of the
freeway, headed east, was the remnants of the most horrific car accident I had
ever seen. There was one car that looked as if a bomb had gone off and
destroyed it, a second had the front end bashed in, and a U-Haul trailer off on
the grass. It didn't appear damaged, though. There were clothes and personal
items strewn all over the road and there was a child safety seat sitting in the
middle of the carnage.
When I got to the hotel that
night, I searched to find out what happened. I got the bare bones that night.
The next morning, the news had the rest of the details.
At 11:40 that morning, a black
1996 Toyota Camry headed west on I-24 crossed the median into the eastbound
traffic. It made impact first with the U-Haul, but did only minor damage to the
truck. Then it slammed head-on into the Rav 4 driving behind the U-Haul. The
man driving the U-Haul was uninjured. His wife and two daughters were in the
Rav 4.
On the Saturday after the
accident, the wife (who was wearing her seat belt) was said to be in stable
condition per the news articles. The two daughters, aged 6 and 7, were in
critical, but stable condition. They'd been restrained in child safety seats.
The car that caused the accident
was the one that had looked torn apart. There was a father and two daughters in
that vehicle. All of them died. The 11-year-old girl was dead at the scene. The
father died at a local hospital, and the 16-year-old daughter died after being
transferred to Vanderbilt hospital in Nashville.
What I read said that the father
driving the U-Haul was freaking out and that people who stopped to help had to
calm him down. Another quote was from a woman who was a former first responder
who happened to be there shortly after the accident. She tried to save the
11-year-old girl who was in the Camry.
I haven't been able to stop
thinking about this. I imagine the father in the U-Haul watching his family get
hit head-on. I wonder if he sat in the hospital replaying the accident, trying
to come up with what he could have done differently. I wonder if he thought if
only he'd done this, it would have deflected the Camry away from his family's
car.
I wonder about the wife and the
two girls who are in the hospital. Stable doesn't mean well. It doesn't mean
they don't have serious injuries that could take months to heal or might even cause
them lifelong issues. I wonder about how much therapy—both physical and
psychological they'll need to recover.
I wonder about the mother of the
girls who died in the other car. How terrible it would be to lose both
daughters like that. How does someone deal with that kind of sudden loss?
I think about the people on the
scene. The people who saw the accident happen. The people who ran over to help.
The people who saw the injured and dead loaded into ambulances. I think about
the police and the firefighters and paramedics who arrived on the scene and did
their jobs—and what they'll have to live with for the rest of their lives. And
I wonder if they've seen other accidents this bad before.
When I saw the scene, I started
praying for everyone involved—both victims and families and first responders.
And I said a thank you that I was safe and that I hadn't seen the true
nightmare images of people hurt, dead, dying because I don't think I could have
seen that and not had it impact me strongly. Just seeing the cars impacted me
incredibly hard. And the thing is that I could have seen that accident. I could
have been in that area at 11:20 if I'd left on time that morning, but I was
tired and dawdling and didn't leave until later than I'd planned. And I said thank
you for that, too.
