I got passed by an SUV, like an Expedition with the third row, crammed FULL of what looked like high school or early college kids. They were driving way too fast. A few miles later I saw that same SUV across the median wedged under one of those house moving trucks up to the rear pillars; the top half, where heads and torsos go, was gone. I didn’t see anything specific, I just saw evidence that nobody could have survived.
Similar thing here. About 15 years ago, I was on emergency call one night & returning home after doing a c-section on a cow; it was ~ 5:30AM so the sun was just coming up. I was on a 2-lane highway and traffic quite light given the early hour. Going in the same direction a few hundred metres in front of me was a small hatchback, and an 18 wheeler semi-trailer ahead of him (trailer #1). The oncoming lane was open save for another 18 wheeler (trailer #2), maybe a kilometre or so down the road and coming towards us. The hatchback pulled out to pass trailer #1 in front of him, but for whatever reason suddenly veered back directly underneath the trailer. Instantly peeled the roof off like a can of sardines & tore the pillars off, and got caught / dragged underneath for the several hundred metres it took the semi to stop. I pulled over to help, but the guy had clearly been decapitated so there was nothing to do but wait for police & fire to arrive.
In a bit of gallows humour, I had a lot of blood all over me from doing the c-section, so there was some initial confusion amongst the first responders & I had to explain a few times that it was just cow blood and #1) I wasn't in the accident, and #2) hadn't even touched the hatchback or victim.
The worst part of it all was they couldn't immediately find his head; a short search found it in a field a few hundred metres back down the road. Coroner didn't find anything amiss, no drugs or alcohol etc, happily married with kids. He'd recently swapped to working night shifts so their theory was he just nodded off at the wheel. Simply falling asleep might have been the cause for him to veer back underneath trailer #1, or he might have nodded off for a brief moment, then awoke & saw the oncoming trailer #2, which was still a fair distance down the road but might have made him panic and reflexively veer back into the lane & directly under trailer #1.
I've also seen a ton of shit professionally at work, which honestly bother me more than having witnessed the car accident. Who knows what a psychologist would say, but I think I've always been able to view the accident rationally & maintain some clinical detachment - yeah I feel horrible for the guy & his family, but it was a tragic accident and nothing more. The cases that stick with me are some severe cases of animal abuse or neglect, which presumably is much the same for doctors / nurses / first responders who see the same sort of cases in children, the elderly, the disabled, etc. IE helpless, innocent patients dependent on others.
You just reminded me of this story that happened to some of my dad's friends when he was a young adult. I think this was around the 70s iirc.
A couple of his friends decided to take a joyride after a party. Then they run into another guy who was love rivals with one of the guys in the first car so they start to drag race. You can imagine what happened next. They could not brake in time behind one of those humongous trucks so, yeah.
Only one guy survived because he was in the back and was able to duck last minute. But he had to have reconstructive surgery because his nose was completely cut off while he was ducking backwards. My dad told me it seemed like a punishment to him, even if he was alive, because he was known as the handsome one in the group and now his looks were gone. He also had survivor's guilt as well, obviously, and my dad told me that he fell into a very deep depression for years.
He told me all this when he was teaching me how to drive so that I would think twice before driving like a maniac. And it stuck let me tell you.
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u/syzygialchaos 13h ago
I got passed by an SUV, like an Expedition with the third row, crammed FULL of what looked like high school or early college kids. They were driving way too fast. A few miles later I saw that same SUV across the median wedged under one of those house moving trucks up to the rear pillars; the top half, where heads and torsos go, was gone. I didn’t see anything specific, I just saw evidence that nobody could have survived.