27 MINUTES
How the young victim of a freak car accident was brought back to life.
Ashlyn Krell died. There’ s no question that for at least 27 minutes last February, along a stretch of Highway 401 in Southwestern Ontario, she drowned.
You wouldn’t know it, save for the small, pinkish tracheotomy scar at her neckline from her four weeks in a London, Ont., hospital.
Otherwise, she’s still the same Ashlyn — a happy, loving woman “eager to enjoy every day and see what there is,” she says with a ready smile and bright, dancing eyes.
As for the car crash and drowning, Ashlyn doesn’t remember much — really, any — of it.
She doesn’t remember the skid off the icy road east of the Veterans Memorial Parkway overpass and her little blue car’s quick descent into the ditch.
She has no memory of the violent crash on the driver’s side into the exposed extension of a concrete culvert. The car flipping over into a deep construction hole filled with water. Hanging upside down in her seatbelt. Cold water filling up the inside of the car. Darkness. People yelling at her to hang on.
The last thing Ashlyn remembers from Feb. 12, 2017, is chocolates.
The 28-year-old had bought them earlier in the day as a gift for her younger brothers for Valentine’s Day.
“That’s pretty much the last thing I remember,” she said, her husband, Brayden Krell, sitting beside her on the sofa in the living room of their cosy London apartment.
She was so close to not being here. An incredible constellation of quick thinking, medical expertise and determination saved her life.
For some months, The London Free Press has been reconstructing how Ashlyn was able to survive a harrowing night and a lengthy hypothermic submersion in icy water.
Over the next few days you will meet Ashlyn and her family, along with the police officers, firefighters, paramedics, medical staff and others who gave her back her life.
Ashlyn doesn’t remember what happened.
But they do.
“The 401 is very unforgiving,” said Sgt. Calum Rankin of the Ontario Provincial Police, a veteran of working the highway.
Ask any police officer who has cut their teeth patrolling Canada’s busiest highway, and they will tell you: speeders, impaired drivers, jackknifed trucks and ferocious, heartbreaking crashes are their bread and butter.
The weather and the road conditions can change in what seems a heartbeat. Feb. 12, 2017, was one of those nights.
It was a fairly routine evening, save for the rain, when OPP Const. Peter Reintjes climbed into the marked SUV at the London detachment at 6 p. m. to begin his 12- hour Sunday night shift.
It was a welcome change of pace. Sgt. Perry Graham, his longtime colleague and friend, had asked him and Const. Emad Haidar to shore up his and Rankin’s understaffed platoon for some extra coin.
Reintjes, a 21- year OPP veteran and a decorated Canadian Armed Forces reservist, served Canada in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. He jumped at the chance to step away from his normal duties on the drug squad and get back out on the road.
Haidar, who worked with Reintjes on RIDE programs to check for drunk drivers on cold winter nights, had fired up a cruiser. The young father had been picking up as much overtime as he could swing, “trying to get things taken care of ” for his family.
By the end of the shift, Haidar, Reintjes, Graham, Rankin and the rest of the platoon would share a special bond.
Earlier that day, Ashlyn had kissed Brayden goodbye before heading to Waterloo, Ont., to visit her two younger brothers at her parents’ house.
Dustin, 23, and Dylan, 20, needed a home-cooked meal and a check- in from their big sister while they were on their own at home. Their parents, Gord and Sharon Skopnik, were in Uganda working with war refugees as part of a Christian mission.
This had been their way of life since the Skopniks both graduated from bible college. All four of their children were born overseas while they did their faith-driven work.
Ashlyn’s sister, Alyssa, and her husband, Andrew Stapley, had begun their own missionary work in Botswana that same month.
With everyone overseas, the blue Toyota Corolla that was in her father’s name was lent to Ashlyn and Brayden for the year.
That evening, before leav- ing her brothers, Ashlyn sent Brayden a text message at about 8:30 p.m. that she was on her way home.
With that, she tucked her cellphone into a wallet and pushed it deep into her purse, part of her commitment to never let her phone distract her while driving.
Without warning, at about 7:30 p.m., the temperature nosedived.
A cold front turned the heavy rain that had fallen all day into ice and snow, most severely along a 15- kilometre stretch of Hwy. 401 near London.
“You could have measured the thickness of the ice,” Graham said. “It would be nothing to strap on a pair of ice skates and be able to skate on the pavement.”
Graham, a mountain of a man who’d worked as a cop for almost three decades, marked the weather change and temperature drop in his duty book and braced himself for what was coming.
The calls to 911 dispatch started in a steady stream — cars skidding off the road or hitting the barrier walls, transport trucks jackknifing — with all officers working from crash to crash, assessing damage and, thankfully, finding only minor injuries before moving onto the next.
Reintjes said the night ranked in the top-three worst nights he’s ever driven the 401.
Tim Wiechers was one exit away from finally getting off that mess of a highway and heading home.
The last part of his twohour drive had been a white-knuckler as he guided his car along the slick westbound lanes toward his cut- off at Veterans Memorial Parkway in London.
The soft- spoken, unfailingly polite 26- year- old Londoner was driving back from Richmond Hill, Ont., after visiting his girlfriend, Marcela Ahumada, a law stu- dent at York University’s Osgoode Hall. He needed to be back in time for classes the next day at London’s Western University, where he’s completing a masters geography degree in urban climatology.
Wiechers was glad to be getting off the 401. “It was a gross night,” he said.
The sign for the cut- off was just ahead and Wiechers stayed in the right lane.
And then it happened: A blue Toyota Corolla, about 30 to 50 metres ahead of him in one of the centre lanes, made a sudden, 45- degree turn to the right and went skidding off the road.
“I looked up and I saw t his car going i nto t he ditch.” Then it disappeared.
Wiechers quickly pulled his car over to stop. For a moment, he sat there wondering whether what he’d seen was real. He pulled out his cellphone and called 911 to report that a car had gone off the highway.
Then, he thought he’d better call his mother, Brenda, and tell her he was delayed.
Brenda Wiechers is a trauma nurse with decades of experience. “I’m not really exactly sure what to do here,” he told her.
Her advice was to get out and go see if he could help anyone in the car. Wiechers kept her on the phone as he got out in his shirt sleeves and ran down the steep ditch.
There, he saw the impossible. To his amazement, the little car was upside down in a small, deep pool of water that had collected beside a new concrete culvert.
All he could see was part of the undercarriage and the four wheels. The engine was still running. The headlights glowed eerily through the icycold water.
He descri bed to hi s mother, who was still on the phone, what he was seeing. She told him to talk to whoever was in the car. People can still hear you even when they’re unconscious, she said.
Wiechers started yelling. “Help is on the way. You’re going to be OK … the OPP is coming, the ambulance is coming.”
He didn’t know who was in the car, or how many.
During those lonely few minutes, Wiechers considered going into the water himself and trying to open a door. His mother convinced him to leave that to emergency crews.
He scrambled back up to the highway and turned on the tiny flashlight on his cellphone to wave as a beacon for the OPP.
Wiechers didn’t see what happened when Ashlyn’s car disappeared over the edge of the road.
If he had, he would have seen a spectacular crash, cruel in its accuracy, when the car flipped and dropped so perfectly i nto an unexpected small pool.
The hole linked back to a major construction project involving replacement of the highway bridge overpass and off-ramps, and as part of that, extension of the culverts.
Beside the culvert was a hole large enough for the construction equipment to dig out the new extension.
January had been balmy and rainy and February equally as mild — the warmest on record. London had twice as much rainfall in February as it normally gets that month, 62 millimetres compared to an average 34 millimetres.
Waterways that should have been frozen were overf l owing, causing minor flooding. The new culvert extension couldn’t keep up with the water flowing from the fields, and the hole and trench beside the new structure filled up to the top.
Ashlyn’s car left the road at a sharp angle, careening down the slippery slope and slamming into the culvert on the driver’s side, smashing glass and crushing in her door, leaving her with mere centimetres of space on that side.
The force of the collision was so strong, the car managed to flip over on its end, in some mechanical pirouette, and land perfectly upside down in the hole with the driver’s side closest to the abutment.
The car was a perfect fit for the hole.
The call came into OPP dispatch at 9:52 p.m.
“Possible p. i. Rollover.” A personal injury rollover crash near Veterans Memorial Parkway, the next cut- off west of Reintjes’ location.
It took him less than two minutes to get down the road. “It’s pitch black, it’s really dark,” he said. “I just see the witness out of the corner of my eye and I hit the brakes and slid by him by about 100 yards.”
Reintjes backed up and got out. Wiechers, who was likely in shock, was “calmly standing at the side of the road.”
“So, I said something ridiculous to him like ‘ How’s it going?’ He said ‘ good,’ ” Reintjes said. “I said ‘where’s the car?’ ” Wiechers pointed down into the ditch toward the hole and the overturned car. “Over there.”
Reintjes shone his flashlight down the slope and saw the car — its dim headlights glowing hazily in the dirty water.
Reintjes turned to Wiechers. “Where are the people?” he asked.
Wiechers said he didn’t know. He’d seen the car go off the road. He hadn’t seen any people.
“Then they’re in there!” Reintjes yelled, before tearing down the ditch and “going for a swim.”
THAT’S PRETTY MUCH THE LAST THING I REMEMBER.