A Personal 40-Year Anniversary For Hans

As we are dealing with the Covid-19 Corona Virus throughout the world, an interesting and self-defining date has arrived for me.

Today marks the day where 40 years ago (March 19th, 1980) I nearly lost my life. I'm not talking about choking on a hotdog and I was Heimliched into horking it up, or that I slipped on a banana peel and conked my head...

On this day, I was involved in a motorcycle wreck that was very, very bad. So bad that I required emergency surgery and had to be resuscitated on the operating table, then I was in a coma for 3 days.

The characters involved in this story:

16 year-old me, the driver of my Dad's 1976 Yamaha XS360.
Danny Torres, my passenger.
A powder blue 1970's Ford pickup, with 4-5 teenage boys sitting in the bed.
A 1974 AMC Matador, driven by a drunk driver.

1976 Yamaha XS360

 

1974 AMC Matador Base Model

On March 19th, 1980 it was about 4:30PM when my mother asked me to go to the grocery store to get a frying chicken (cut up) for dinner, so I jumped on my dad's motorcycle to make the trip. Before I could drive off though, my buddy Danny asked if he could go along, so I told him to hop on and handed him my spare helmet.

The drive to the Grand Union grocery store was uneventful and we got the chicken for dinner and started heading for home. For some reason, I chose to head north on US1 and take the long way home, but if I remember correctly, it was because I wanted to extend the ride on Dad's bike just a little bit longer.

As we were passing by the junior high school we used to attend, we had a light blue pickup pass us on our left (single lane each way, double yellow, no passing lines painted on the road). I recognized

the guys in the back that belonged to a local gang called ACE and they started throwing whatever they could find in the bed of the truck at us (strips of wood, beer bottles, food wrappers and such trash). As timing would have it, I saw that the bus drop-off lane at the school was coming up, so I gunned it on the motorcycle and passed the truck on their right-hand side.

It was close to this time that things went... well, wrong.

After passing the truck I looked back to make sure they weren't accelerating to try and hit us from the rear, but when I turned to face forward, there was a car directlyin front of me. Turns out, the driver of a Matador that was drunk had just driven into the intersection from my left, totally ignoring the stop sign. I was so focused on the truck behind me, that I didn't realize the car had pulled out into the intersection and I ran into it, striking the Matador on the passenger side. The front wheel of the bike hit the passenger-side front door about even with the dashboard. The speed at the moment of impact could only be assumed from the gauges on the cycle, because when the bike hit, it flipped forward, smashing the needles against the glass. The speedo showed 35MPH and the tach showed about 4 thousand revs. Basically, I was in 5th gear (of 6) and not hammering the bike at all.

When we hit, the motorcycle was wedged into the car and both Danny and I went flying (remember Danny? He asked to go along on this ride...). Danny kind of bounced off of my back and landed on a car that was at the stop sign on the right side of the intersection, landing on the guy's left-front fender and hood, which shifted it back enough to where the driver's door wouldn't open. The guy had to crawl into the passenger side of his car and get out through that door.

As for myself, I ended up flying forward into an approaching Cadillac, landing on my left side across the windshield. I was told that the elderly woman driving the Caddy damn near had a heart attack because of that!

After the crash occurred, witnesses stated that the driver of the Matador opened his door and began tossing beer cans under his car, right there in the intersection. He then got out and people that had rushed to the scene to help said he had slurred speech, was stumbling a bit and one witness suggested that "Nobody light a match, because this guy might explode!". The Matador driver seemed to be unaware of what happened, because he took his small dog out of the car and started walking it around on a leash. One of the witnesses said that not only had the frying chicken we were bringing home from the store flown one last time, but the Matador's driver walked his dog over to the grocery bag and let the dog eat the raw chicken out of it. (Huh? Who does that?)

Okay, this is an absurd crash scene, and you may be thinking; "How could this be worse?" Well, several county police cars arrived and started worked on controlling the scene. When the witnesses were questioned as to what had happened, they told the officers what they saw, to include the beer cans thrown under the car post-crash, the driver's slurred speech, his stumbling walk and a heavy smell of alcohol on his breath. At this point, another officer comes over with the Matador driver's information and shows it to the first officer. They step away for a brief conversation, then the first officer continues on with his interviews of the witnesses.

Later in the court case, we discovered the police report did not have any information about alcohol consumption, there was no DUI testing, nor had they questioned the Matador driver beyond asking for his ID and registration. We later found that the Matador driver was well known to the officers because he was a court reporter at the local courthouse and we suppose they didn't want to hurt his career.

Please note: Some of this information was provided to us by the multiple witnesses at the crash scene, which helped us to piece together what actually happened. The last thing I remember before the impact was looking back to see if the blue truck was gaining on us.

Well, I was transported with Mom in an ambulance to a local clinic that our family commonly attended (we Nieborg kids were very accident-prone and knew the staff on a first-name basis) and the CHI clinic had an emergency room there. They took a look at me and realized I needed much more than what they could provide, so Mom & I were shipped north to Jackson Memorial Hospital. I was barely lucid during the trip, and the only thing I remember is complaining about the bumpy ride in the ambulance, stating that it needed new shock absorbers.

More to come (I promise), as this is a work in progress to get this posted...

More of the story to be told:

Emergency exploratory surgery to find cause of internal bleeding.
Transfusions.
Coma for 3 days.
Leg in traction, left arm suspended in the traction rigging.
First hospital room, 10th floor, roommate dies.
Coded with respiratory arrest in X-ray, checking my kidneys.
Second hospital room, Ortho Ward, 11th floor.
Tim, roommate with broken leg too.
Haitian guy next door, freaking out.
Guy with shotgun wound to the shoulder (scares Haitian guy).
Visitors, with my damaged helmet and pics of the smashed motorcycle.
Visitors from McDonalds.
Hospital meal preferences, chucking some (nasty-tasting) stuff through the window.
Code Blue - Bathroom problem.
Could see Dolphins football game from room (kinda), by standing up in the traction rigging.
Surgery to re-break and re-set my left arm with metal plate & cast on wrist (anesthesia issues) .
Candy-Striper and peanut butter cups / trashcan.
Section 8 visitor.
 Body cast - mini spica.
Rehab for walking with crutches and cast.
Free to wander the hospital.
Released, problems with stairs in parking garage.
Home again, dealing with life in a body cast.
Crutches and Chris.
Caught by the police while driving another motorcycle while standing in a body cast.
Broke the cast and its eventual full removal.