Coward

Normally, I try to keep these posts relatively light but this was messed up.

The tones went off and we were dispatched to a motor vehicle crash. En route we were given the update that it was a vehicle versus pedestrian with multiple patients. We were the second rig on scene and the first paramedic had already done a quick triage. I was split off from my crew and told by the IC to grab my monitor and go confirm the death of one of the patients. Over by some bushes at the base of a light pole there was a yellow highway blanket covering a body. I started to head over when somebody, I can't even remember who - a cop I think, stopped me and said, "Just so you know, it's a kid."

I later found out that what had happened was that two twenty-something idiots decided to peel out while leaving a gas station. They started to fishtail, lost control, and over-corrected sending them onto the sidewalk and right into two pre-teen skateboarders. The first kid tried to jump out of the way and was just grazed by the car. The other took the full force of the car and was sent flying.


I lifted the blanket and saw a twelve year old boy with his obviously lifeless eyes staring straight up at the sky. He had been thrown through the air and into the pole. He must have hit hard enough and in just the right position for it to immediately stop all his momentum because he seemed to have dropped like a stone right to the base of the pole. I thought to myself that normal physics would have had him bounce off or spin around the pole. I still don't get how he landed where he did. In any case, everything conspired against this kid that day, because if the car and hitting the pole alone didn't kill him, the four inch bolt sticking up from the bottom of the pole that went through the base of his skull certainly did. Of course, I didn't learn about the bolt until later when the coroner went to remove the body, but it didn't matter, there was no question he was dead. He had been triaged correctly. I still had to follow the protocol and hook him up to my monitor and run a strip showing him to be asystolic. I did so, and covered him back up then went to help in the extrication and treatment of the idiots in the car.

The driver of the car turned out to be a Mexican national without a driver's license who wound up leaving the hospital, fleeing the country, and supposedly returned to Mexico. I don't know how much more unlucky this kid's family can get.

Please, teach your children to respect the lives of other people, respect the power and force of a moving car and don't screw around with either. That way, maybe they won't wind up killing somebody else's kid. But if they do, I hope they are noble enough to stand up and face the consequences. I don't know how that driver can can live with himself and I can only hope that he is tortured every day by what he did.