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| The author was 18 when she got into a car accident. Courtesy of Dufflyn Lammers |
I was helping my father move when I stumbled upon a police report dated January 16, 1989. As I held the paper, my pulse quickened. The words on the page described the car accident that nearly took my life and left me in a coma as a teenager.
I had never seen the report before, and reading it brought a flood of emotions. But what surprised me most was the mention of a witness someone who had seen the crash and stepped in. I hadn't seen him since that day, but I immediately knew who he was.
I remember the morning of the accident with painful clarity. My boyfriend was leaving for Hollywood with his band, and I was drowning in insecurity and jealousy. The night before, I’d called him in a drunken haze to break up, then crashed at a coworker’s house in San Jose, California.
When I woke up the next morning, I was groggy, hungover, and full of regret. Desperate to see him before he boarded the plane, I jumped into my 1965 Mustang. The windshield was coated with ice, so I rolled down the window and started driving.
I never saw the light pole at the corner of Hamilton Avenue and Saint Thomas Boulevard. But it saw me.
A Stranger Saw the Crash and Refused to Drive Away
After finding the police report, I hired a private investigator to help locate the man listed as the witness. When I wrote to him, he responded. He hadn’t known how badly I was hurt that day. There was no blood, just a visibly broken wrist. But if he hadn’t stopped, I may not have made it.
Nearly two decades had passed. I asked if he’d be willing to meet, and he said yes.
When he arrived at the restaurant, I didn’t recognize him. His silver hair and bright blue eyes were unfamiliar. But over coffee, the pieces began to fall into place. He told me he remembered my car passing his.
“Was I driving in the middle of the road?” I asked.
He said no, but something prompted him to check the rearview mirror after I passed. “I can’t say what,” he said. That’s when he saw me crash into the pole.
He pulled over. He said we should call for help.
“But you didn’t want to,” he said.
That part, I didn’t remember apparently, I had refused assistance. What I do recall is him opening the back door of his car and urging me to get in. I nearly collapsed as I did. He drove me to a Stop & Go gas station nearby, where the clerk called an ambulance.
I Didn’t Know How Close I Came to Death
Over that coffee, he told me he still remembered the leather jacket I was wearing with tassels. EMTs later cut off that jacket, along with my jeans and cowboy boots, inside the ambulance.
At the hospital, doctors discovered that the steering wheel had gouged my stomach. An MRI revealed dangerous internal bleeding. The ER team at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center rushed me into surgery.
They found a tear in my duodenum. Stomach acid dissolved the initial stitches, so surgeons placed me in a drug-induced coma, operating daily to repair the damage, stitch by stitch. Four days later, I woke up shaken, sore, but alive.
That stranger the man I had initially told to leave me alone stayed. He insisted on getting help. If he hadn’t, I don’t know where I’d be now. And yet, for 20 years, I had never thanked him.
We Closed a Chapter That Had Been Open for Two Decades
All these years later, he still drives the same route to work every day. His office is nearby. He has a family now, too. I asked him if they knew the story. He said yes he had told them what happened.
It felt surreal. I could have passed any of them on the street without ever realizing. I could have passed him and never known.
“And I did once,” he said, smiling. “I passed you on the street.”
We both laughed at the absurdity and beauty of that.
People often tell me he sounds like an angel. But he’s a real person flesh and blood, with a commute and a life. And yet, he is as much an angel to me as anyone could ever be.
