Tragic Evening
It was a Saturday night in 2008. It was my friends 18th and I didn’t have my drivers then, so my Father had to fetch me from this party.
On the way back driving through Hillcrest we saw some shrapnel on the road from an accident that had just happened. We were the first ones on the scene.
A Subaru was heading from Harvey’s to Frankies along Old Main Road which was having some major road maintenance done to it at the time. These guys spun out on a bend after hitting a mud patch. There was so much momentum that a girl in the back seat and been thrown out the back window and onto the top of the road edge about a metre high with her head just centimeters away from a man hole. The guy next to her was thrown out the side window and landed in the middle of the road. With the driver and passenger walking away from the wreckage.
I can still remember running up to the guy lying in the middle of the road. His eyes were wide open just looking at me. I checked his airways and called NetCare 911. My feet were in a pool of blood that was coming from his head. He was still breathing but I was worried he might drown. I didn’t have any gloves and I wasn’t trained, so I couldn’t treat him. All I could do was wait until the paramedics arrived and hope they didn’t come too late.
The girl’s boyfriend who walked away from the car came running up to me and asked if I could look at his girl. She was crying, which was good because it meant she was alive, but her arm was like a piece of spaghetti.
NetCare 911 and the Police arrived and my Dad and I helped the paramedics load the patients into the ambulances. The driver had been arrested and was sitting in the back of the police van. He started to complain of chest-pains. We had to argue with the cops before they would open up the van and let the Doctor see him.
After the last ambulance left, we began to drive home. My father said to me “John, did you see the car at all?” I said “no”. We later figured out that the tow truck owner was friends with the driver. The Subaru had been removed with the guys still lying around all over the place, hurt.
Two days after I learnt that they guy lying in a pool of blood was actually one of my good friends that lives just up the road from me. He was so badly messed up I didn’t reconise him at the time. Today he lives with only 1 eye.
I still keep the blood stained shoes I was wearing that night in a plastic bag at the top of my cupboard as a reminder not to drive under the influence and not to drive with others who have been drinking.
“God has ways of warning us”.
John-Christopher Delport
