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Ever since my accident, I don’t feel like I’m the same. In some ways it’s made me a better person. But in others, I feel weak or insufficient. Not to me but as though I’ve let my family down. I don’t remember my life for the month of April and even the first one or two weeks of May. I do however; remember my accident on March 30, 2005. Two days shy of owning my first Harley for one year. That was a day that literally changed my life and all my loved ones lives forever.

The light turns green and everyone starts to go. Of course the right lane moves slightly faster because they’re all cars and the semi-truck to my left is heavy, and can’t take off as fast. We start to go just fast enough so that I can put my feet on the pegs and the guy in a blue SUV next to me takes off. As he does, his mirror smacks my mirror on my handle bars. I remember seeing the plastic on the back of his mirror crack. This makes me start to wobble. Not having enough speed to regain control but wobbling enough that it’s impossible to put my feet down, I decided to bail my bike. I let it go down in front of the rear tire of the semi truck. My bike falls to the left and I try to jump to the right, away from the truck to no avail. We both go down. My motorcycle is on the ground facing away from the truck with the tires toward the rear and I’m parallel with it. My legs are towards the passenger seat and my torso against the gas tank. My head was practically resting on the handlebars. The truck was not traveling fast enough to “catch” or get traction enough to run OVER us, instead it drags us with it.

So now we (my bike and I) are laying in front of the rear passenger side tire of the trailer of this monstrous eighteen wheeler hauling a full load of sand, being dragged along the road at about four or five miles an hour for about thirty feet. Somehow the engine became stuck full throttle. As the sparks from the metal scrapping along the ground start to fly, the gas tank explodes into flames, sending a huge blue fire ball up in the air about 20 feet. This sends flames and fuel in every direction. Now my leather jacket and I are on fire, being dragged along the road. The truck driver doesn’t realize what’s going on until someone pulls in front of him to stop him. As he hits his brakes, the tire finally gets enough traction and rolls over my motorcycle and then me, before coming to a stop. He later admits to hearing horns honking, people yelling, and feeling what he describes as a flat tire. By the time the truck stopped, he had dragged my bike and I about 25’ to 30’.

There I lay, in extreme pain, with my back resting on my tank and handle bars and my jacket and bike are on fire. Another motorist was in the far right, or fourth lane. He had heard me rev my engine at the motorist and heard the long rev when I was run over as well as seeing a blue fireball go up in the sky. One of his fellow co-workers, was in another vehicle next to him, in the third lane and saw the blue SUV and heard my bike as well. They both immediately threw their vehicles in park and came to my assistance. When the truck finally came to a stop, the motorists pulled the bike from under me and dragged it to the rear of the truck. One of them hollered for a fire extinguisher and put the fire of my bike out, with an extinguisher someone had handed him. Meanwhile, the other motorist put the flames on my jacket out with his bare hands.