[wdfifteen]

This is the part I wish I hadn't seen, but the whole story is below.

It shot in the air and rolled a couple of times in the air, came down flat on the highway and rolled another couple of times. Somewhere in all of this I saw something blue and white shoot almost straight up into the air.

It was Friday, February 25, sunny and dry, and the time was about 10:30 AM. I was driving west on I 74 just west of Indianapolis. I was in the passing lane and I believe there were some cars in the slow lane and about 200 yards in front of me was a PT Cruiser. A truck in the slow lane crossed the center line and the Cruiser went left to avoid it. The Cruiser went off the left side of the road and got all four wheels in the grass. I think it got a little sideways there and may have started to roll but it happened fast and there was dirt and grass flying. The truck was ahead of the Cruiser by then. I went to the slow lane and slowed some, but was about 50 yards behind the Cruiser.
The car moved back toward the pavement and suddenly took off like it was launched out of a catapult. It shot in the air and rolled a couple of times in the air, came down flat on the highway and rolled another couple of times. Somewhere in all of this I saw something blue and white shoot almost straight up into the air. Somehow I ended up all by myself in the slow lane about 10 yards short of the car, surrounded by the PT Cruiser parts strewn all over the pavement. The Cruiser was lying across the slow lane on its side with the bottom towards me. I called 911 and was hassling with the dispatcher and walking up to the car thinking, “Oh man, what am I going to see on the other side of this.”
When I got around the car there was a girl, maybe mid-twenties, squatting on what would be the driver's window looking at me through either the windshield hole or the sunroof it was hard to tell. She had a bump on her lower lip and a lower tooth was pushed in but she looked pretty much OK. I talked to her but she wouldn't talk, she just sat and shook. Some people came up and someone offered her their cell phone and there was some milling around and I heard someone say, “THAT doesn't look good.”
I looked around and about 20 yards away in the ditch was a pile of something that was blue and white. I started walking over to it and a woman started coming behind me. It was a body - a woman, probably in her 20s. She was what I saw flying out of the car when it was rolling because she was wearing jeans and a white top. It looked like she had landed on the top right side of her head, because there was nothing there, a patch of her scalp about the size of my hand was laying in a pile by her skull. She was laying kind of on her back and on her left hip. I don't know much about first aid, but after 5 years with TJ I knew how to take a pulse. But taking a pulse to measure a heart rate and doing it to see if there IS a pulse are two different things. I thought I felt something weak and irregular. The lady behind me turned out to be a nurse. She took her other wrist and felt her neck and we agreed that there was a weak pulse. The nurser knew CPR started working on her while I monitored her pulse. I only felt a few beats, then nothing. After a while her lower jaw opened a little and she made a couple of choking kind of coughs, then her jaw moved again and that was that. Her lips and the inside of her mouth got darker and darker. The nurse kept asking “How are we doing” and after a while I said, “I think she's gone.” And the lady checked her pulse at the wrist and neck and said “So do I. She's dead.” She had blonde hair and though she was a little heavy she had small hands and slender, graceful wrists. She was wearing eye makeup too.
The nurse disappeared and I never saw them again. All the time we were there with her only one other person came around. A cop walked over and looked at her, didn't even bend over, just stood with his hands in his pockets and looked for a minute and left.
I walked back to the wreck and a cop asked me if she was dead and I said yes. I was standing there and some guy poked me in the ribs and pointed into the back of the car and there was a baby seat. He started to say something, but I shushed him and we looked in the junk in the back of the car and looked under the car. If a 150 pound woman could get thrown as far as that lady did when the car was rolling, a baby could be anywhere. We got some guys together and started searching the ditch. I don’t ever again want to have to search a ditch for a dead baby. We finished the ditch and were walking back to go check the median when someone told us they got the girl talking and she said there were only the two of them in the car. Some guy got her to give him a number and he used his cell phone to call her friend or someone. I thought that was pretty smart.
The ambulance and a bunch of fire trucks showed up and the cop that watched us when we were with the dying girl said, “There's a deceased female there and an injured female in the vehicle.” I thought, “How does he know she's dead? He's taking my word for it and I don't know anything about dead people.” So I told the EMT he ought to check her.
Something I found strange was that a lot of cops showed up very soon, but all they did was direct traffic. They never took charge of anything. When the cop came over to the dying woman I thought, “Great, somebody who knows something.” But he just looked and walked away. We were debating about whether to get the girl out of the car or not I was hoping one of the cops would know the best thing to do. I said we should leave her in there and they didn't say a thing. I hope it was the right thing. They left it up to me and a couple of other guys with no experience to take charge of what to do with the people in the wreck.
What weird day. One minute I was driving along thinking about this talk I have to give and a few minutes later I was kneeling in a cold ditch holding a strange woman's wrist as her life slipped away. I got on the Indianpolis newspaper’s web site and found out the woman’s name was ------------ and she had two kids.
The Mercedes had two damaged tires from driving over the PT Cruiser parts and they went flat before I got to Peoria.