Holiday miracle? Students walk away from crash
Staff writer
Two Arkansas sisters in their first week at Hesston College narrowly escaped serious injury when a car they were traveling in on 150th Rd. Monday afternoon ran off the road and careened in a spectacular trajectory through a ditch, narrowly missing a tree.
“I blacked out,” driver Alexis Clemons, 23, a criminal justice major from Little Rock , said.
“I don’t remember how I got there,” she gestured to her dad’s battered maroon 2011 Buick LaCrosse in an overgrown hay field.
Their car sat at the end of a 100-yard track of debris and tire imprints that started with skid marks on the asphalt and through a ditch. The car scraped through low branches of a tree and across the hay field.
The driver and her sister Kristina Clemons, 22, had been headed to a cross-enrollment class at Tabor College in Hillsboro.
Kristina Clemons said she thought that Alexis might have “zoned out for a second, and I think I freaked her out when I told her to watch out.”
Hillsboro assistant police chief Randy Brazil’s accident report listed the cause of the accident as the driver being ill or having a medical condition.
The report says that the driver said “the last thing she remembers is her passenger yelling at her.”
The women declined medical aid.
A Goessel fire and rescue team and a Marion County sheriff deputy also responded to the accident.
Dustin Conquest, who’d just come outside to light a Labor Day barbecue, saw the incident across the street from his home at 576 150th Rd. and was astonished and relieved that the women were unhurt.
He and a Labor Day guest said squealing brakes first alerted them.
The Buick had been traveling east on 150th Rd. between Eagle and Falcon Rds. not noticeably faster than the normal speed of cars on the rural road, he said.
“I saw the car fishtail, and it looked like it had hit the tree head-on,” he said. “They just disappeared, and I called 911.”
He noted the time of his call was 1:45 p.m.
Conquest’s guest, who asked only to use his first name, Paul, ran to the scene, following car tracks as they veered off the south side of the road through a dry ditch and tree branches to where the car stopped. He found the two women walking, uninjured, beside the car, he said.
Shortly after Brazil handed the sisters their key chain minus the car key that was jammed in the ignition, the two sat in a Goessel fire truck in 106-degree heat, flustered but repeating gratitude for their safety.
Kristina said they survived the roller coaster ride uninjured “because of seat belts.”
Their dad, back in Little Rock, sounded unruffled on speaker phone.
The only worry the now-carless sisters expressed was Kristina’s concern:
“I just hope our professor lets us do our work online,” she said.