The First Time I Saw a Dead Man

Posted on July 13, 2010

It was a quiet dark winter night around 1AM and I was a little 6 year old girl sleeping soundly in my ruffled pink bed. My bedroom was on the second story of a split-level home my parents owned on Long Island. My bedroom is the one shown on the far left of this picture. This is an actual picture of the house today from Google maps.  

 I lived directly across from the Seaford Oyster Bay Expressway. If one would look out my window, there would be the expressway and the thousands of vehicles passing by every day. The only thing that separated my house from it was a 7 foot chain link fence.  I no longer live in this house or on Long Island. 

Here is a satellite view of my old house in relation to how close it was/is to the expressway

 

I’m sure I was dreaming about something pleasant when a sudden jolt and a loud boom almost knocked me out of my bed. I heard a crumpling noise and something that sounded like water gushing copiously and my dad’s voice yelling “get back…get back! Oh my God GET BACK!!!!”. I remember my heart pounding loud and hard as I swallowed back a lump of fear in my throat and rubbed my eyes and tried to shake the fuzziness from my mind filled with the cloudiness of sleep.

I made my way to my closed bedroom door as I heard the commotion getting louder and the voices of my other family members joining in the shouts and commands. I opened my door and spotted my older sister C standing at the mid section of the stairway in her nightgown; her dark hair completely disheveled and a look of horror on her face as she gazed down the stairway. No sound was coming out of her mouth - only the look of speechless horror as she grasped the railing with both hands seemingly to keep from falling to her knees.

I remember smelling gasoline and feeling a burst of cold air as I ran to the top step. I stepped down until I was able to view down into the foyer between the railing poles as I grasped them with my little hands and sat down hard on the step. My heart literally jumped up into my throat when I discovered what all of the loud commotion was about.

There in my foyer was a car – yep that’s right – a big CAR! Freezing cold air hit my face and blew back my baby blond hair as I gaped in horror at this car. Bricks were scattered on the floor everywhere and water was gushing loudly from broken pipes. I noticed my dad was standing next to the car trying to get his arm into the window opening. Inside the car was a man; his face covered in blood; his eyes open and staring straight ahead in a fixed gaze. I started to cry in fear and confusion. My other sister K came up behind me and grabbed me from behind and looked down with me. This was a comfort to me and helped ease that painful lump in my throat.

My other sister T was down there with my mom next to her both of them were screaming at my dad to get away from the car. What I learned later and as time went on was the whole story, as being 6 years old I didn’t understand what the nature of it all was: This man had a heart attack and actually died while driving down the expressway, and the car veered off of the road and through the chain link fence and right into my house at a very high speed, landing the entire vehicle in my foyer. It completely destroyed the front of my house and obliterated the guest bathroom and the front entrance. If you look at the picture of the front of my house, you can see the front door and to the left of it between it and the garage is a little window, and that’s where the bathroom is.

I found out later that my dad was watching some late night TV in the den downstairs and he was thinking just a few minutes before that he had to use the bathroom, but he decided to wait until the commercial before he went. If he would have gone when he thought about it, he probably would have been killed because there was nothing left of that bathroom but a bunch of rubble. When the car blasted into the house my dad ran into the foyer and forced his arm through the cracked window to unlock the door to open it and shut the engine off because he was thinking the car might explode and kill everyone.

I was very young when this happened so my memories are not as sharp about everything but I remember being outside in my nightgown and a coat after-wards and all of the neighbors gathering around and a fire truck and ambulance were there. I also remember something strange that the little girl next door L was skipping happily down the sidewalk in her nightgown...crazy.

It took about a month or so for our house to be repaired.  I remember my mom had the newspaper article, but after she passed away I couldn’t find it anywhere. If I ever find it, I will put it in this blog.

I will never forget the image of that man dead and bloody in his car, and I will never forget the unparalleled fear I felt that night.