Split-second Samaritans

Katie Beth Ryan
Published: March 7, 2008

The last thing that Ray Falls remembers about the morning of Dec. 7 is the boom his 2000 Toyota 4-Runner made when it crashed into a tractor-trailer on the U.S. 29 bypass.

Falls was driving southbound on the U.S. 29 bypass, slightly north of the VA 130 exit.

The force of the crash ejected Falls out the back windshield of his truck and landed him 50 feet away, in the middle of the northbound road—the force of the crash having ripped off many of his clothes.

Cars drove by as he lay swollen and bloody.

The first thing he remembers was the sound of a woman’s voice.

“She said, ‘I’m gonna pull you out of the road,’” Falls said. “(She said) ‘I hate to do it, because I don’t know what kind of injuries you got.’ But she pulled me out of the road.”

Falls, Sherri Smith and Karen McDaniel were all on their way to work that Friday morning. But only after getting on the bypass did each realize the severity of the road’s condition.

“It just looked like a light drizzle,” Smith said. “There was no indication that there was ice on the road.”

Same thing for Falls.

“I checked this road here,” Falls said of the gravel road in front of his Amherst home. “Most of the time, if there’s going to be any ice or anything, it’s on this one.”

Falls, a plant supervisor at the Aerofin Corporation, and was driving 65 mph, the posted speed limit. Smith was driving behind Falls, saw him crash and made the 911 call at 6:50 a.m. But seeing Falls’ body on the northbound side of the road, Smith assumed the worst.

“I told 911, ‘There’s no way anyone’s alive in this. You have to come right now,’” she said.

But the dispatchers were swamped with calls that morning. In the 20-minute interim between the time Smith placed the call and the paramedics arrived, Smith cared for Falls who was suffering from both external and internal injuries.

She pulled him by his feet to the edge of the road, careful to keep his body as stable as possible. Smith also tried to reassure him.

“I just talked calmly to him. I knelt by him, [and] just made sure I made good eye contact with him. I told him it was a really bad accident, that he had injuries, and he just had to sit still until help came.”

Fortunately for Falls, Karen McDaniel also saw his body lying on the side of the road. An EMT at the Central Virginia Training Center, McDaniel provided a blanket and assessed the extent of Falls’ injuries.

“I asked him his name, did he know what day it was,” McDaniel said. “I was just trying to see where he was mentally. And he was there, he knew everything.”

“His main concern was his wife. That was all-he wasn’t even worried about himself.”

McDaniel intended to take the U.S. 29 business route that morning.

“I was not going the bypass, because I knew that was nothing but ice,” she said. “Now I know I was supposed to have done that. I don’t question it.”

Today, Falls walks without the use of a body brace. He’s had surgery to correct five broken vertebrae in his back, and he’s currently in physical therapy sessions to heal the nerve and muscle damage in his arms. He may not be able to scratch the top of his head for some time, but it’s a small price to pay to still be alive.

“Everybody seems to think that you’ll going to live forever, but it just proved to me that there is a second when you could be gone,” Falls said. “I guess I just put that back in my mind … maybe I’m not in control.”

Though Falls’ wife Romelda considers both McDaniel and Smith “good angels and good Samaritans,” Smith herself feels that her reaction was normal.

“You’re obligated as a person to stop and help someone,” she said. “Everybody’s made a really big deal out of it. They said, ‘You’re a hero,’ and I just said, ‘I did what anybody should have done.’”