Fast-thinking teenagers help rescue freeway accident victim

JANN HENDRY/Acorn Newspapers BRAVE HEARTS—From left, Damon Michaels, Carl Brocket and Ivan Robles risked their lives to help a man out of a burning car. Good friends Carl Brocket, Damon Michaels, Brandon Sprout and Ivan Robles stood outside their Lincoln Navigator in the emergency lane of the 101 Freeway in the early hours of Jan. 18, and knew they had to make a decision, and make it fast.

Just seconds earlier, Michaels, the driver of the SUV, had witnessed a serious accident involving an 18-wheel tractor-trailer and a Lexus sports car. The frightening collision, which happened on the northbound 101 near White Oak, left the Lexus completely mangled along the center median and, even worse, jutting out into the fast lane of the normally bustling freeway.

After pulling to the side of the road, Michaels put the vehicle into reverse and drove backward until he and his passengers were directly across from the accident. What they saw prompted them into quick action.

“We could see all these sparks flying out from underneath the engine,” said Michaels, a 19-year-old Oak Park resident. “It looked bad. You could just tell whoever was in there needed help . . . and nobody else around was doing anything.”

Four lanes of the freeway— which even at 2 a.m. was fairly active with traffic—separated the four men and the fiery wreckageBrocket, a certified EMT with aspirations of becoming a firefighteracted first.

“Carl just instantly sprints across the freeway through traffic,” Sprout, 18, said, “and the rest of us followed.”

Brocket, an 18-year-old Agoura Hills resident and a freshman at Moorpark College, said he was alerted by two other onlookers that someone in the burning car was still alive and couldn’t get out. Ignoring the danger to himself, he acted on the primal human urge to preserve life.

“I ran over there to help . . . because there was definitely a life in danger. I wasn’t just going to leave him there, with no one around, to burn alive,” Brocket said.

Avoiding oncoming traffic traveling 65 mph or faster, Brocket eventually reached the burning vehicle. When he realized he couldn’t open the two doors that weren’t wedged against the center divider, Brocket tried to shatter one of the car’s windows with his foot. That effort failed as well.

The other three men, as they saw the flames from the engine getting bigger, decided to find an item more suitable for smashing a car window. With nothing to work with, they headed in the only other direction possible—back across the freeway.

“Ivan and I went looking for anything we could find,” Michaels said.

Meanwhile, Sprout said, flames from the Lexus continued to spread, and the popping sound of burning plastic grew louder. Still, no one had emerged from the vehicle, and no other help had arrived.

“People just kept driving by like nothing had happened,” Sprout said. “There were no cops there, no paramedics, no nothing.”

Taking a heavy object brought to him by his friends, Brocket finally broke open one of the car windows. He then stuck his head inside the burning car to look for the victim, a male who at that moment was able to free himself from the wreckage.

“I guess as we were breaking the windows, he kind of came to, and was able to kick his way through the front window,” Brocket said. “I’m not exactly sure how he did it, but all of a sudden I saw the kid lying on the road.”

Knowing the victim was still in danger of being hit by a car, Brocket helped lift the driver of the Lexus over the center divider to safety, where he used his EMT training to administer first aid.

“His face was really bloody, and he was complaining that one of his ears hurt,” said Brocket, who had received training in the L.A. County Fire Department Explorers and the Ventura County Fire Cadets programs. “But for the most part he was okay. I’m sure he was just happy to be out of the car.”

At this point, the other men sprinted back across the freeway to call 911 and get away from the burning car. Once there, Michaels and the others turned around to discover just how close the accident victim had come to being burned alive.

“Within seconds of (him) getting out of the car, not minutes, but seconds, the whole car was in flames,” said Michaels, who snapped a quick picture of the automobile-turned-fireball with his cellphone. “It was amazing.”

Soon afterward, both the CHP and the fire department arrived on scene. After treating Brocket for cuts on his elbow and taking down a report from each of the friends, authorities asked the group to depart. None of them ever learned the driver’s name or how he fared.

Now almost a month since the incident, the four friends, all of whom met while attending Westlake High School, are still affected by what they saw—and did—that night.

“I’m convinced if we weren’t there that guy would have died, 100 percent,” Michaels said. “It’s like we were put there that night for a reason.”

When asked if they thought, in hindsight, that running across four lanes of a freeway in the middle of the night probably wasn’t the greatest idea, all replied that they had no choice.

“In that situation, we just had to go, stupid or not stupid. If we would have just called 911 and waited, there’s no way they would have been there in time,” Michaels said. “It might sound crazy, but to us, it would have been crazy to just sit there and watch the guy die.”

The group gives most of the credit to their friend Brocket, who showed a side of himself they hadn’t seen before.

“Carl should get most of the credit. He was the first one running across the street, trying to plan out a strategy of what we should do,” Sprout said. “He amazed me that night. To see one of your good friends do something like that . . . it’s just incredible.”

Brocket said the experience helped reaffirm his desire to become a firefighter. It also helped prove to him that he was capable of risking his own life to save another.

But a hero? Brocket doesn’t seem to think so.

“I don’t know how much of a hero I am because I didn’t actually pull the guy out of the car. I just kind of ran over and tried to help him out,” Brocket said.

“People will say to me, ‘You saved some guy’s life.’ Yeah, I guess so. But to me it was fun. It’s not every day you get to break through the windows of a burning car.”