Olympic Auto Recycling Freestyle Division

Have you ever considered the most impressive automotive indiscretions that have occurred around you? Medics and firefighters get to see a lot of them. Most are fender benders, some are major, some are fatal. Which one stands out in your mind? Is it the one where the mini van is doing cart wheels down the street while the soccer mom is Still on the cell? How about the one where the cement mixer avoids one car and rolls over on the pickup with two occupants (another cell incident)?

I was about twelve years old and living in a three story house on the edge of the main road out of town. There was a road that crossed the main road and continued as a dirt road as it passed the house. Our yard was fairly large, probably a hundred feet square. My room was on the back of the house on the third floor.

The only person I talked to about the details of this little interaction was the driver of the auto that got hit. He was driving to work at sometime around midnight. The speed limit was 55mph, it was fairly cool and clear. He was drinking coffee and listening to the radio, just enjoying the ride. His car, a Pontiac Bonneville, commonly referred to as a land yacht, was heavily built as some APCs.

Out of nowhere, according to him, there was a flash of white light and a noise like an explosion. Suddenly he found himself in the back seat, his clothes almost torn off, and the engine of the land yacht was now in the front seat. When we went out to see what happened he was running around in circles trying to figure if this was an alien abduction gone wrong. He was seriously confused. I couldn't blame him.

I slept through everything except the dude under my window, bleeding in a puddle and moaning fit to raise the dead, "somebody please help me, I'm dying". Not dying, but drunk, and sick. He was from the second car, also a land yacht.

I know you will find this hard to believe but alcohol was involved. The four occupants of this car had been partying and were heading home. They intended to cross the main road and follow the dirt road through to the bypass around town. They had just reached escape speed going down hill when they ran a stop sign, and found the first car. They intersected right front fender to left front fender. They were going fast enough that the frame of the second car dug gouges in the pavement. The first car was doing the speed limit, the second car, you can make your own guess. The old Pontiac Tri Power engines weren't quick, but given enough time, they could get up an impressive head of steam. These boys were judgmentally impaired, and had plenty of road to get seriously stupid, being dog drunk didn't help.

When they hit the first car they kind of changed direction and hit a huge transmission pole in our front yard, split it half way up, and drove it backward in hard clay several inches. They continued across the front yard, knocked a twenty foot tall hedge over, jumped off a three foot high wall, went across a parking lot, jumped a concrete lined ditch three feet wide, and hit a building hard enough to jerk the windshield out. Some of our neighbors a half mile or so away heard the impact, and thought the building next door was blowing up again, and came to watch the fire!

The building next door was a body shop. When the guy who lived there came out and saw the car crushed against the wall, he promptly snatched one of the mirrors off the car and hid it, to sell later. There was one man left in the car, his shoes had been knocked off his feet and were still sitting on the floor side by side. His friends, and I use the term very loosely, had slid his unconscious carcass across the seat, glass and all, and put him in the drivers seat. We could see the smears in the blood, really nice guy's. I bet they were digging glass out of his butt for days!They had run off to hide in our garden. The cops showed up and sorted everything out, removed the wrecks, and generally restored order. I didn't hear if any of them died.

A couple of days later, I was in the front yard and saw something shiny on the roof. I climbed up to find windshield glass and badges from the cars, a hundred feet from the road.