LAWRENCEVILLE—While authorities haven’t returned our requests for info yet (in all likelihood because they’re still tied up with the paperwork), one of the drivers at the scene of tonight’s head-on collision in Lawrenceville has told what he saw—and how it was a near-miss for him.
Mike Stephens of Bridgeport said he was headed in to Lawrenceville Walmart with his wife and 2-year-old with him in his truck shortly before 7 p.m. on Highway 250 from Bridgeport to Lawrenceville, with a white SUV ahead of them in the eastbound lane.
He and his wife were talking when he then looked up and saw a white Dodge Dynasty westbound but IN his lane, the headlights coming right at him.
Stephens said “I was gonna ditch the truck,” and described how he “jacked the wheel to the right,” noting that the SUV in front of him was going the same, with their front right tire already in the ditch off 250.
But at that point, the driver of the Dynasty, whom Stephens said he “looked right at, and she looked right at me,” oversteered, went to the left, then proceeded to hit the car traveling behind Stephens’ truck head-on. That car, a white Pontiac Gran Prix GT, was owned by Aaron Seed but being driven by Seed’s buddy, whose name Stephens didn’t catch in the aftermath of the whole thing.
Stephens said when the two vehicles struck, he watched, in his rearview, as the Seed car spun around and the woman’s Dynasty hit the ditch sideways, then rolled five times, landing on its top.
Stephens turned his truck around to go back to the scene of the accident, as were some others.
He went to the ditch where the woman’s Dynasty was upside down.
“She was trapped,” Stephens said. “The gas was leaking. She was having trouble keeping her eyes open, going in an out of consciousness.”
It happened that one of the vehicles that was passing by, and had stopped to help, was being driven by a trauma/ER surgeon at an Evansville hospital who was on his way to work. He told Stephens that he would take over, and Stephens went to the Seed vehicle to help and to calm everybody down. Stephens noted that several people had stopped and were making efforts to help when emergency medical personnel arrived and an air evac helicopter was made available.
The woman, whom Stephens described as being in her 40s as best he could guess, was alone in her vehicle. He proposed that maybe her blood sugar had dropped, possibly leading to the head-on, but he did note that her cell phone was “ringing and ringing” when he was at her car, so there’s no real way of knowing what it was that ultimately caused the collision. He did say, however, that her vehicle, when it was coming at him, appeared to be running at a high rate of speed (his guess was close to 70 mph)…and that when he was near her at her car, he could see that the impact that crushed the front of the Dynasty had crumpled it so badly that “the dash was touching her chest.” Worse, there was a big truck traveling the road behind the Seed vehicle that, had she struck that one head-on, would likely have killed her.
As it was, it appeared, to Stephens (who stayed on-scene until air evac flew the woman out), that she was at least alive and somewhat alert, and there was blood running down her face…but it’s evidently a complete miracle that the accident wasn’t worse than it was.
We’ll try to update in the morning; feel free to leave your comments if you were one of those at the scene, and tell what you saw.
Walmart can be seen in the lower center of the photo; the accident reportedly happened in the vicinity of the store, but closer to the rehab place, which isn’t marked on this map, on 250.