When he heard the truck, “vrrrrooooom,” Brian Nettles knew the driver would never make the curve.
He told his girlfriend so. a second later, they heard the crash. they jumped in his truck and headed out to Bells Ferry Road, a narrow two-lane in rural Harrison County. the truck was flattened. It had flipped over and over and landed against a telephone pole. Miraculously, the driver stood in the middle of the road.
Nettles and his girlfriend, Rhonda Lawson, saw a car in the ditch. the woman behind the wheel was clearly dead. Lawson, a respiratory therapist, headed to the car. Nettles moved his truck to shine his headlights on it. “There’s kids in the car,” Lawson called out. one boy sat upright, unconscious. a smaller boy lay across his lap.
She heard the larger boy snorting. he was trying to catch his breath. the smaller boy had no pulse, so she focused on the other child. At first she thought his teeth had fallen out. But then she realized he had been wearing plastic vampire teeth, the kind that glow in the dark.
Once she removed them, the boy could breathe. he had a faint pulse. When he stopped breathing, she breathed for him. Lawson and Nettles managed to pull him into the ditch, where she continued to breathe into his lungs. She kept telling him, “It’s going to be OK,” until an ambulance arrived.
The accident, she and Nettles said, was something no human should see, much less experience. they could not sleep for four days. even now, more than two months later, they think every day about it. Sights and sounds — such as a racing engine driving past the curve — trigger images from the evening of Oct. 28.
Nettles was struck by the upheaval the accident caused. the man, driving about twice the 35-mph speed limit, according to the accident report, told Nettles and Lawson he was just trying to get home for dinner with his family.
“a wreck like this changes so many lives in an instant,” Nettles wrote in an email to the Sun Herald. he wants people to realize — on New Year’s Eve and every day — they need to slow down, pay attention and drive sober.
Fun evening turns tragic
The evening had been enjoyable for Elaine Clark, 61, her grandson Alijah Osborne and his best friend, Jordan Jones, both 10. Clark doted on her grandchildren, who called her Nana. She’d taken Alijah and Jordan to the fall festival at their school, DeLisle Elementary.
Alijah’s big sister, 15-year-old Alanna Necaise, talked by cellphone to her Nana, who said they were headed home. When they failed to arrive 10 minutes later, Alanna tried to call her Nana. the phone rang and rang. Alanna knew something was terribly wrong. She called her mother, Didi Wahl.
Aftermath of an accident:Many lives shattered in an instant
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