Hospital bills, lost jobs follow hit-and-run

What he knows of the crash, he learned indirectly, from police reports and the statements of two good Samaritans.

Tony Caldwell doesn’t remember any of it.

He was on his way to a roofing job on that Monday, Sept. 28, 2015. He lives outside Chillicothe and also delivered The Dispatch back then. That meant an early start, and by 6:30 a.m. he already was in Columbus, northbound on Route 33 beneath I-270 on the Southeast Side. As was his habit, he planned to jump off 33 at Refugee Road to grab a coffee at the Speedway.

He awoke days later in OhioHealth Grant Medical Center, and he’s still dealing with the fallout from what happened in between.

Columbus police said Caldwell, 49, probably was slowing for traffic when his 1999 Pontiac Sunfire was struck from behind by the driver of a GMC Yukon.

“It pushed everything from my trunk into my back seat, and everything from my back seat into my front seat,” he said.

Caldwell was trapped in the wreckage.

“There were two nurses that seen it happen,” Caldwell said. “They were on their way to work. They seen it,

and they stopped to help. He gets out of his vehicle and walks up to them two nurses and asks if I’m going to be alright.

The nurses said they didn’t know. The man walked back to the Yukon, appeared to remove something from inside, and entered a small area of trees. Then he came back.

“He asked them two nurses again, ‘ Is he going to be all right?’, and they said, ‘We don’t know.’”

The nurses, of course, were focused on the seriously injured Caldwell, not the uninjured Yukon driver. He was gone when police arrived.

The Yukon was owned by a North Side woman. She told police that morning that she had allowed a relative of her husband’s to use it. She gave police the relative’s name, age, description and the street he lived on.

This might sound like the

“To me, that’s attempted murder out on the highway, to leave the scene. That man didn’t know if I was going to live or die.”

makings of an open-andshut case. Far from it.

Columbus police Sgt. Brooke Wilson said the owner of the Yukon, who turned out to be uninsured, clammed up. Detectives couldn’t show the nurses a photo array that included the relative’s mug shot included because the women couldn’t provide a good-enough description to warrant a photo array.

“We were unable to identify a suspect to the degree necessary for prosecution,” Wilson said.

Caldwell, then, was not going to get justice in a criminal courtroom.

If only that were the end of it. The crash left him with a broken jaw, a broken shoulder and broken ribs. He was laid up for three months and lost both his jobs. His wife took a third job to pick up the slack. Although he had car insurance, the crash occurred 12 days before the health- insurance policy at his roofing job was to start.

He recovered his lost wages through a victimscompensation fund but is on the hook for about $250,000 in medical bills. An attorney is helping him seek relief through the Hospital Care Assurance Program, a state and federal program that helps qualified patients with unpaid hospital bills.

Caldwell thought about suing the Yukon’s owner and the suspected driver, but he was advised not to bother; neither person had assets. He was not surprised to learn that the suspected driver has a history of

driving without a license and was convicted in July of operating a vehicle while under the influence, stemming from a June 11 traffic stop on the East Side.

Caldwell said of the crash: “To me, that’s attempted murder out on the highway, to leave the scene. That man didn’t know if I was going to live or die.”

A follow-up surgery on his jaw has Caldwell out of work again. He is at wits’ end as he and his wife try to pull together copies of income-tax returns and other paperwork for the HCAP program.

He worries that they will lose what little they have.

“I don’t own nothin’, but what I do own, I wanna keep,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“It stresses me out, it does,” Caldwell said of his plight. “You’re trying to be an everyday citizen and live the way you’re supposed to live every day and work two jobs? That ain’t right.”

—Tony Caldwell