"I was 17 years old when a drunk driver ran me over and left me for dead." - Bill Oefelein
By Bill Oefelein with Colleen Shipman
For Soul Shaking Grief
Summer 2009
I didn’t know what hit me. In fact, I didn’t even know I’d been hit. I woke up cold and confused, lying on the pavement and unable to move. I gathered it was a wintry night and I was outside. Apart from that, I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
It was 1983. I was a 17-year old growing up in Anchorage and a senior at West High. I drove a 1967 Chevelle. A red one, which, I was pretty sure, was somewhere nearby. I tried turning my head to look for it, but nothing moved. My breath came out in puffs of vapor then rose above me and disappeared. It was fogging up the sky, and I felt like I was running late. Something wasn’t right. I racked my brain to recall the last few moments, but it was no use. My thoughts were scrambled and buzzing through my head like a swarm of bees.
I still couldn't move, not even to call out for help. My ears rang, and my head ached. I had no idea where I was.
The last thing I remembered was driving home from a Beach Boys concert, so I latched onto that memory and let it play out. It had to be after 11:00 pm on that typically frigid February night, and I was a couple blocks from home. I had just passed the intersection of Dimond and Minnesota when my car stalled. I turned the key a couple times as I steered my car off the road. "Come on...," I coaxed, but the engine simply wouldn’t start. When my car stopped rolling, it was already off the street, but I decided to push it a little farther onto the shoulder. The last thing I wanted was for someone to hit my car.
I put the car in neutral, got out and gave it a shove. That was it. That was where the memory stopped…right before a drunk driver hit me.
His name was David, and until that night, he was a man of small consequence, already hell-bent on feeling sorry for himself for the rest of his life. He had no job, no friends and a miserable disposition, which on that evening was more self-loathing than usual. It was his birthday the night he almost killed me, and none of his family had remembered to get him a cake.
So, he angrily grabbed his keys, got into his truck and began hopping from bar to bar on an epic, "poor-me" drinking binge. He’d already been arrested several times for drunk driving, and his punishment hadn't been severe enough to deter him from doing it again. And again. And on this night, he would add “felony hit-and-run” to his record of DWIs.
But before he did that, he baited a cab driver.
As he peeled out of a bar’s parking lot, he cut off a yellow cab and sped away. Angry, the cab driver took off after the pick-up truck and caught up to it just a few blocks down the road. Then the cabbie watched in horror as the driver swerved off the road and plowed into a car, sending the limp body of a teenager in the air. The motorist sent his own truck careening into a snow bank.
The cab driver immediately called for an ambulance on his radio and relayed what he saw. The drunk got out of his truck and glanced nonchalantly at my motionless body, now lying in the middle of the road. He surveyed his truck, which was stuck in the snow, and put it in 4-wheel drive. He then got back behind the wheel, freed his truck from the snow bank and sped away.
As the cabbie radioed police, another Good Samaritan stopped to help. Having seen the whole hit-and-run unfold, he stayed with me while the cabbie followed the drunk driver to make sure he didn’t get away.
About a mile down the road, the drunk ran his truck off the street again, and this time his 4-wheel drive couldn’t free him. The police put him in the slammer. He wouldn’t be running anyone over again anytime soon.
"You got hit by a car." A voice startled me. Then a man’s face appeared. "We called an ambulance. Try not to move."
I wanted to roll my eyes. No problem, I thought. There I was, incapacitated and bleeding to death in the middle of the road. Where the hell did he think I could go?
Somebody threw their coat over me, but I was still freezing. Hit by a car. The man’s words rolled through my head, and as their meaning took hold, the strangest sensation of relief overcame me. Now I knew what happened. The swarm went silent. The confusion abated. I could finally think, but the thoughts that came were not pleasant: I was hurt. Bad.
I blinked, and when I opened my eyes again, I was bumbling down the road inside an ambulance, still freezing cold and shivering violently.
"What hospital do you want to go to, kid?"
"D-D-Doesn’t m-matter," I answered, teeth clattering. Then I remembered my dad. "Wait. My d-dad’s in-n-n the Air F-Force."
"We’re going to Elmendorf," he called to the driver.
I blinked again and was in the emergency room. The florescent lights blinded me as doctors and nurses chattered nonsensically. I never felt so cold in my life. Just before I froze to death, a woman appeared with more blankets.
Pile ‘em on, I thought, but to my horror, she stripped all my covers off. I gasped, but before I could protest, she bundled me up in the blankets she’d brought. I drew in a sharp breath, and prepared to shiver, but an enormous warmth bubble enveloped me. Somebody had warmed up the blankets. I sighed my relief.
It’s difficult to describe the bone-freezing cold that accompanies blood loss and shock, but having experienced the subzero temperatures in both Antarctica and interior Alaska, I can confidently proclaim that neither holds a candle to the chill delivered by shock. I don’t remember a lot of what happened that night, but I do remember those blankets. Whoever thought to put blankets in the dryer and then wrap them, still warm, around a trauma patient should get a medal. Feeling the warmth of those fuzzy, just-removed-from-the-dryer, emergency room blankets was a thin, little slice of heaven on that night from hell and a feeling of comfort I never forgot.
As I lay there enjoying my warmth bubble, I thought of my parents. We’d had dinner together at Skippers that night, after which they reminded me of my curfew.
"I’ll be home by midnight," I assured them. Guess I was wrong.
My mom heard the ambulance sirens as she got ready for bed that night, not knowing they screamed for her son. She said a small prayer, asking God to stay with whoever was hurt and hoping they’d be alright. She thought nothing more of it and put another curler in her hair. Fifteen minutes later, she crawled into bed. She had just closed her eyes when the phone rang.
The man on the other end introduced himself as Sgt Gonzales from the Elmendorf Air Force Base Hospital. Then asked, "Is this Mrs. Oefelein?"
"Yes."
"Mrs. Oefelein, your son, William, was just admitted, and you should get down here right away."
She felt the blood drain from her face. "Why? Wh...what happened?" she managed.
"He was involved in a car accident, and you’d better get here right away."
Her heart pounded. She hung up the phone, woke up my dad, and they flew out the door.
Their route to the hospital took them past my crumpled car, where police and witnesses converged.
The police officer pulled her aside, gave her a Cliff’s Notes version of the hit-and-run, added that they’d caught the guy, and suggested my mother get to the hospital. Quickly. Knowing how badly I’d been hurt, he gave my parents a police escort, which only scared my mother more.
As they pulled away, my mother looked back at my red Chevelle. The driver’s side door was demolished.
When my parents got to the hospital, the doctor explained that my injuries were critical, and he couldn’t assure them that I’d make it through the night. As he described my head injury and partially severed leg, he led them to my room.
They tried to hide their anguish as they entered, but I could tell they were worried. My mom had been crying, but, in typical Oefelein fashion, she tried to break the tension with a joke. "Geez, Billy," she chided me, "if you didn’t want to go to Hawaii tomorrow, all you had to do was say so." She chuckled, but I could tell she was fighting tears.
As they surveyed my leg, I snuggled in my warm blankets. My Mom looked scared. My Dad offered some words of encouragement, but his somber expression reflected the severity of my injury. The heat from the blankets sunk in, and so did the gravity of my condition.
I was supposed to go to Hawaii the next morning, but that was definitely off the schedule. As was football, hockey, skiing, running, walking, school, showers and a thousand other things, including flying for several months…or forever. I didn’t know, and I needed to find out. So, while my parents worried whether I’d live through the night, my thoughts were elsewhere. I took stock of what happened, and decided to heal. Death never crossed my mind.
I had plans, and those plans required both legs working at full capacity, so the first chance I got, I confronted the doctor. He'd just arrived in my room with 4 of his buddies. They ushered my parents into the lobby.
"Doc, will I ever walk again?" I needed to know.
He hesitated. "Probably."
Probably. Hot diggity! That meant a better than 50% chance, and that’s all I needed. I felt reassured, renewed and ready to start healing! Then I realized something. These men came here to straighten out my leg.
I cringed. This "healing" was going to hurt.
In fact, that leg-straightening remains the most excruciating pain I’ve ever felt, and it was no small affair. It took 5 very large men to straighten it out, but for some reason, absolutely no pain medicine. Some of the details before and after the straightening are fuzzy, but this is the gist of how it happened.
There were 6 major players in this event: my doctor, who should’ve been nominated for an Oscar; another very large doctor; orderly #1, who looked like he swallowed a wrestler; orderly #2, who swallowed an even bigger wrestler; orderly #3, who looked like The Terminator; and finally my mangled leg.
Sometime during the course of being hit by that drunk driver, my right leg below the knee twisted itself around so that my foot now pointed backward when my knee pointed forward. Both the tibia and fibula were broken in half and sticking out of my skin. My foot was dangling by strands of what I believe was muscle. I tried not to look at it. I knew my leg was trashed, and I wondered how the doctors would ever fix it. This, I was about to find out.
"We have to set your leg," the doctor proclaimed. "These two--four…these four gentlemen," he motioned to the door, where the four giants stood waiting, "are going to hold you down while I, uh…straighten out…your leg." He paused, assessing my reaction. Then he rubbed his hands together, looked at the orderlies and said, "Ok!"
Standing at the head of my bed, one orderly took hold of me under my right shoulder and the other held me under my left. Still another held me down by my hips while the very large doctor grabbed my injured leg above the knee. They adjusted their footing. The fifth man, my doctor, positioned himself at the foot of my bed and grabbed my dangling foot.
I clenched my teeth and gripped both sides of the bed, which was my feeble attempt to help in this procedure. Plus it gave me something to concentrate on. My doctor looked up at the two giants holding my shoulders then executed an academy award-worthy move that made Jack Nicholson look like an amateur.
"On three," he said, and I think I saw him wink. "One…"
CRACK!
He pulled and twisted my foot around so fast I saw stars. I could only grunt, stunned by the searing pain.
The doctor set my mangled leg down and hesitantly put his hand on my good leg, keeping a defensive posture and looking as if he were ready to dodge a jab.
"Doing alright?" He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
I stared up at him, teeth clenched, eyes wide and unable to force air. The orderlies slowly released my shoulders, and my doctor moved to the side of my bed.
"You must have a really high tolerance for pain, son. Most people scream when I set a broken bone." He wrinkled his brow. "One guy even punched me in the nose." The doctor took a step away from me.
I certainly understood the urge to punch the man, but was anxious to heal. I wanted him to work on the next step, which turned into a 2-hour surgery to stabilize first my life, then my leg.
My parents waited outside the operating room for what seemed like an eternity. In those days, the hospital didn’t allow visitors in the ICU, which is where I recovered after surgery, so my parents stayed in that waiting room until 7am; until the staff finally assured them that I would live.
With that bit of good news in hand, they called my older brother, Randy, who was at school in Colorado. He insisted he would come home to help his little brother. My mother mustered her brave voice and explained there was nothing anyone could do but wait for the injury to heal. She convinced him to stay at school, which he did, but his mind was always on his brother. Over the following week, he called several times a day to check on me.
It was a long, hard road to recovery. I endured 3 major surgeries, missed several weeks of school and had to cancel my out-of-state freshman year in college.
My mother missed almost two months of work so she could stay home and help me eat, shower and go to the bathroom, none of which I could do on my own.
I ended up spending my freshman year at The University of Alaska in Anchorage where, instead of playing football, I had a third leg surgery.
A few months after the accident, there was a trial. The drunk driver was hard pressed to explain why he left a 17-year old kid in the middle of the road to die. He was a habitual drunk driver, uninsured and out of work. A few days into the proceedings, he pled guilty to driving drunk and to felony hit-and-run. He asked the court for leniency.
The judge turned to my father. "Sir," he said, "what do you think this man’s punishment should be?"
My father, still furious and empathizing with the pain I was forced to endure, didn’t hesitate. "Break his leg," he demanded.
The judge explained that breaking a leg was not something the court could do. Instead, he sentenced the man to 11 years, adding that it was the most punishment the law allowed, and he wished he could put him away for longer.
Unlike me, the man who ran me over and left me for dead walked out of the courtroom unassisted. He served 4 of his 11-year sentence in prison, spending the last 7 on parole.
After all these years, my Mom still struggles with what this drunk driver did to her son. When asked about it, she replies with anguished questions. "How could someone just leave my son alone in the middle of the road to die? How could he get out of his car, see that he’d hit a kid, see that kid bleeding in the middle of the road, then get back into his car and drive off? How could he do that to a kid?"
She explains that when someone leaves your child to die, cold and alone and in the middle of the road, it’s hard to forgive…hard to turn the other cheek. Though this event still torments her, she takes comfort in the good deeds of those who stopped to help. "Thank God for the cab driver and other Good Samaritans who called the ambulance and stayed with my son," she says. "Ultimately, they saved his life."
As for me, I’ve filed that accident away and moved on. Though I still bear the scar of my encounter with a drunk driver, I rarely think about the night someone ran me over and left me for dead. Eerily, I consider myself lucky, because I survived. I got up, and I walked again. Too many victims of drunk driving are not as fortunate. Too many pay the ultimate price.
The written works and photography on this site are the property of Adventure Write and may not be copied, reproduced, edited, published, transmitted or uploaded in any way without express written permission. For information on reprinting this short story or to commission a story for your publication please email admin@adventurewrite.com