Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
- A semitruck crash on Legacy Parkway led to a 3 1/2-hour extrication.
- Witness Kamden Lee and Sgt. Arik Beesley described the challenging rescue efforts.
- The driver, severely injured, remains in serious condition at the hospital.
CENTERVILLE — The day after an ugly semitruck crash left the driver severely injured and left traffic snarled for hours, one of the first witnesses on the scene and a trooper shared their accounts of the subsequent rescue that included a three-and-a-half-hour extrication effort.
Kamden Lee said he couldn't believe how quickly the wreck happened right before his eyes Tuesday afternoon on Legacy Parkway.
"Next thing you know, he just runs off the road and just totally flips over," Lee said during an interview Wednesday with KSL-TV. "It was crazy — real crazy."
Lee said he told his boss to pull over, then he got out and ran to the cabin of the semitruck to see what he could do for the driver.
"The whole front of the truck was just mashed," Lee said. "His legs were totally crushed by the engine, so he couldn't really move."
Lee said he stepped into action as others around him called 911.
"I took my coat off and put it under his head to try to give him a little bit of comfort because he was in pain. He was screaming and it was pretty gruesome, to be honest," Lee said. "I was just there, holding his hand and trying to comfort him, just telling him to breathe."
When first responders arrived, it didn't look good.
"The hard part was the vehicle was on its side, so the driver door was laying in the dirt," Sgt. Arik Beesley, with the Utah Highway Patrol, explained.
"The passenger door was up, and he was down at the bottom, pinned," Beesley said. "So they had to extricate through the back of the truck, which turned into being a nightmare."
Beesley said what troopers thought would be an initial 15-minute extrication turned into an ordeal that lasted roughly three-and-a-half hours.
"It was difficult — they had to cut out all the seats, dashboards," Beesley said.
He said the driver's leg was twisted under, broken in "many places," and "not how God made it"— making for an extremely challenging process for crews to remove the man from the mangled truck.
"It was more like playing a big game of Jenga," Beesley said.
According to Beesley, two trauma surgeons arrived by helicopter to help crews assess whether an amputation was possibly required on scene.
"Luckily it didn't come to that," Beesley said. "We thought it was going to."
He said, fortunately, crews were able to safely remove the driver, who also had suffered a head injury, a compound fracture to his arm and internal bleeding.
Beesley called the process "excruciating" to watch.
As of Wednesday afternoon, he said the man was in serious condition at the hospital.
It appeared a steering tire blew and caused the crash, Beesley said.
"Yeah, I was pretty worried about him," Lee acknowledged.
Lee said he was grateful the driver survived after a crash that affected everyone who witnessed it.
"It was a wake-up call for me," Lee said. "Drive careful out there, you know."
