Category: Uncategorized

[Originally posted to Facebook on February 23, 2010]

When describing the video of my accident a few months later, still in early stages of recovery from brain damage, I said in passing “This is the accident where I was killed.” Even through my brain damage I realized pretty quickly that it didn’t actually happen that way. I’ve thought over those words several times since then to figure out why they felt right to me, but haven’t completely figured it out. They still feel right, including the ridiculous melodrama of saying it that way.

On December 7, 2006, I stayed late in the Neurolab at Georgia Tech, finishing up my part of a group presentation in Hybrid Neural Microsystems laboratory class. By the end of this semester (when I had worked long hours every day for this 3-credit-hour class, and even longer for the SEVEN credit-hour Systems Neuroscience class at Emory), I was starting to question my decision to quit my job and earn a PhD. Especially since the work I did that night was not the technical work I enjoyed, but work on my LABORATORY NOTEBOOK. I’ve always hated “notebook work,” nearly failing high school because of this. I considered the notebook I kept the year before to be a useful record of my work on the project, but the instructor failed it, so I was doing excessively-detailed work this year. I had gotten an “A” for notebook work the first module this year, but the instructor for the second half was my nemesis from the year before…

I remember working on the notebook late that night. I’ve found a couple of e-mails sent around 9pm that I can remember writing. I don’t remember the last work I did that night, nor do I remember leaving the lab; everything after this is reconstructed from the (good) evidence I can find. I left some time around 11pm and walked to the Midtown MARTA station. This was the coldest night that winter so I was probably walking rapidly. I took the train to Doraville station, arriving just before midnight. I drove my silver 2000 Toyota Echo from the parking lot, went the length of Park Avenue, past City Hall and the Police Department, and got into the queue turning left onto Buford Highway.

“A” -Doraville MARTA station “C” – Entrance to our neighborhood “B” – Accident site

When the arrow turned green I entered the intersection to jog over into my neighborhood, but I was interrupted by a black pickup truck speeding south through the red light on Buford Highway. The instant of impact is hidden in the police video [LINK ABOVE] behind another police car, but you get to see an impressive shower of debris from my car. The truck struck the front driver’s side corner of my car, which slammed my car sideways into his truck to start my flight. My tiny car was enough to make the truck spin sideways, and the side of his truck hit the front of the obscuring police car at the intersection, hard enough to total the police car. I haven’t met this officer, but a lawyer claiming to represent him did call me and my lawyer a couple of times with some incorrect, unethical, and contradictory statements about what he had “seen” of the accident. More on this in another note.

All three of these vehicles continued south down the highway out of the video. The police officer in the totaled car was injured, I believe with a broken leg. The guy who hit me was unconscious. I was also unconscious, which was probably good, since I had a shattered lower leg, several broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a severe brain injury. The officers then proceeded to describe the accident among themselves in a way that even my severely damaged brain in the hospital could see was impossible: They said that my tiny (less than a ton) Toyota Echo had been speeding down Buford Highway, slammed on brakes, struck the pickup truck with enough force to cause it to strike (and total) the police car sideways, with all three cars having enough extra energy to continue sliding down the road for 30-50 feet. To make this possible in their minds, they assumed that my car was going in excess of 100 mph, which it probably couldn’t have done if dropped off of a large cliff. But to make the physics work, I think my car would have needed to be going closer to 200 mph. The actual accident report detailing this fantasy was written up by a Georgia State Patrol officer who arrived on the scene a few minutes later, and whose car video of arriving on the scene then was the only evidence entered in his support. I’m not sure whether the fact that the accident took place on a state highway, or the fact that a Doraville Police Department vehicle was destroyed and an officer injured in the accident determined that the State Patrol officer wrote the report.

The State Patrol officer called my home about two months after the accident where I was convalescing with a broken leg and severe brain damage. He called to speak to my wife about court arrangements for the charge against me of running the red light, but when I answered the phone, he asked if I had any questions. I said that we had gone to some effort to reconstruct my movements that night, and we couldn’t figure out any way that I could have been driving that direction down Buford Hwy, since we had pinned down that I was at Georgia Tech an hour before that, and had to ride the train back to get my car in Doraville. He said “Well, you must’ve gotten lost in Doraville, ’cause you were definitely going that direction. I saw the video that night.” My wife says that the “got lost” meme was in the air because I kept an Atlanta road atlas in my passenger’s seat, and it apparently flew open onto me or under my hand during the accident. But this was the first confirmation that such a video existed, and he was more generous than my car insurance case manager who suggested to Lisa that I had been up Buford Highway visiting a hooker that night. I don’t reckon those hookers are too attractive, and I don’t speak Spanish anyway, so we ruled that out pretty fast.

But all of this was weeks after the accident. That night, the perpetrator and I were rushed to Grady Hospital, where I got excellent trauma care. My brother, Eric, had worked in the ICU at Grady while training as a nurse anesthetist, so he knew a lot of the people down there. He mentioned that the perpetrator and I were in the same room for a while, and his family kept glaring at me. The doctors graded my responsiveness on the Glasgow Coma Scale at 3/15 a few hours after the accident. On that scale anything less than 9/15 is categorized as a severe brain injury, and 3/15 is called “deep coma or death.” From this they told Lisa that I might be able to learn to feed and dress myself after recovery. She said that would be an improvement over before the accident. I may have imagined that last part. After two days my score had rocketed up to 9/15, on the border between “severe brain injury” and “moderate brain injury.” 2 weeks later I was all the way up to “minor brain injury,” since I could grunt in response to questions. I could also squeeze my wife’s and mom’s hands, but I really seemed to ignore doctors. Since I quit work to return to school a few months before the accident, the minor brain injury may also have been a preexisting condition.

I just read my medical file from Grady for the first time to check those numbers out. It was an amazing story from the paramedics and the emergency room doctors. Reading it, I assume the guy didn’t survive, which takes me back to the title of this note. I’ve mentioned some of it already, but the further parts of the story will be my early treatment and rehabilitation, our investigation about the accident, our court cases, and my (ongoing) later recovery and financial trials.