The 27-minute race to save a ‘dying’ woman. Part 3
PART THREE IN A SERIES
The evening of Feb. 12, 2017, was “a horrendous, miserable night.” London, Ont., district fire chief Al Braatz knew there would be lots of work on Highway 401 once the temperature dropped.
Already, there’d been plenty of calls about fenderbenders and cars off the road. He and a driver were heading out to the highway with Engines 10 and 9 for a rollover crash, with “a possible extrication,” near the Veterans Memorial Parkway cut-off.
More information came through the radio. The car had rolled into water and was “totally submerged.”
Braatz and his driver looked at each other. “The first thing we said to each other was, ‘Good God, what body of water is out there?’ ” Braatz said.
Moments earlier, Middlesex-London EMS paramedics Ken Jones and Shireen Jackson, along with paramedic student Marco Sanchez, had left the standby ambulance station behind Fire Station #10 on Trafalgar Street for the same call.
Jones, a 37-year paramedic, has seen almost everything on a job that requires steady nerves and instinctive medical skills. He’s an advanced-care paramedic, meaning he can perform more medically intrusive treatments if they’re needed.
Jackson, a nine-year primary-care veteran, approaches the job with empathy and determination. On this night, she’d become a valuable mentor to the paramedic students out on the road, most notably Sanchez, who had worked as a paramedic in his native Mexico before coming to Canada and finishing his training at Fanshawe College in London.
They’d already been out to the 401 that night and knew the driving conditions were dangerous.
“It was a skating rink,” Jackson said.
Jones guided the vehicle to the scene. Down in the ditch was Ashlyn Krell’s overturned Toyota Corolla with only its wheels and part of its undercarriage poking out of the water. They could see two OPP officers. One they thought was kneeling on the culvert and reaching into the water, trying to get into the window.
“The other officer was a big, tall guy. He was in the water up to his chest, trying to get the door open on the other side,” Jones said.
Jones jumped out of the ambulance and ran down into the ditch toward the car. One of the officers handed him his flashlight because his hands were so cold, he couldn’t grasp it anymore.
“We even went back to the truck to see if we had any towels or something they could wrap their hands in to keep warm, but they were so intent to keep going,” Jones said. “They were so intent to get back to what they were doing, they were right back in the water.”
The paramedics didn’t know how many people were in the car, but they stood ready for whomever was pulled out.
The next few minutes would be excruciating.
Fire captain Brad Enright has made it his life’s work to get people out of tough places — but this crash was a first.
Enright had raced to the crash in Engine 10 from the Trafalgar Street firehall with a team of extrication experts and had lumbered down the bank to where the blue car was jammed into the hole.
By then, the emergency teams were trying to assess what to do. Two OPP officers were in the water looking for a way to get inside. Another, Sgt. Perry Graham, was on top of the car. The situation, at first glance, was dire.
Once the fire department was there, the officers stepped back and deferred to the firefighters’ expertise.
The decision was to get a couple of the firefighters, including hydraulics specialist Stan Dobbin, on top of the car to try to cut away the hinges of a door.
But there was hardly any space in which to work. The car was jammed tight in the hole. The doors, even if they could be opened, wouldn’t swing out far enough to get inside.
Enright knew a tow truck was coming and it was going to be essential. But he also knew that many times, one piece needed in the chain of success for a rescue might not be there in time.
That car had to be pulled out for anyone inside to have a chance.
Eric MacKenzie was walking out to his tow truck after grabbing a coffee at an eastend London Tim Hortons when he heard his dispatcher call about an upside-down car.
It had been a busy night for the tow truck driver from Ross’ Services since the weather had turned foul and the roads icy.
But busy is how MacKenzie likes it. A laid-back man in his 20s, who has his late father’s name tattooed on his arm, he’s happiest behind the wheel of his flatbed tow truck and at the job he’s had for about two years.
Arriving on the scene, MacKenzie saw the car and realized how unusual this tow was going to be.
He could see the police officers and firefighters were working frantically to find an opening.
“Organized chaos,” he said. “The first thing on my mind (is) there’s somebody in (the car) and we need to get it out of the water so fire can get her out.”
Even after more than 15 minutes, to all of those on the scene, it was a still a rescue.
Sgt. Calum Rankin was at the back of the tow truck, watching impatiently as the cables were slowly unwound from their spool.
“You see everything happen in the movies and it happens really quick. The reality is, the tow truck cable only comes out (slowly), it doesn’t matter if you pull it.
“You want it to go faster.”
By the time the car was about to be pulled out of the water, Tim Wiechers, the Western University student who saw Ashlyn’s car slide off the road, was in the back of Const. Alex Soucie’s cruiser, giving him an official statement.
“At that point, I was told the person wasn’t going to make it,” Wiechers said. “Be prepared. This is a fatal accident and the chance (of) this person surviving is very low.”
Soucie gave him his card and some phone numbers for help lines “if I needed to talk to anybody,” Wiechers said. “He told me that was everything, and I could drive home.”
The student’s mother, Brenda Wiechers, a trauma nurse, was sitting on the stairs inside the front door, waiting for him, when he arrived home. His teeth were chattering and he was in shock.
Wiechers’ mother encouraged him to talk about what had happened. She told him he did the right thing by making the 911 call and being there for the first responders. Together, they researched submersion hypothermia and surveyed the odds of surviving. She told her son that if the driver didn’t survive, perhaps she would become an organ donor.
“And that was still a beautiful outcome,” she said.
Const. Peter Reintjes had snapped the licence place off the front of the car while he was in the bone-numbing water and passed the number on to Graham and Rankin.
A quick search showed the car was registered to Gordon Skopnik of Waterloo, Ashlyn’s father. Waterloo Regional Police were contacted to go to the home. Unless someone could tell them, or until the car was out of the water, they still didn’t know how many people were inside.
By now, Rankin had ordered the soaked and freezing constables, Emad Haidar and Reintjes, to get to the hospital.
Neither of the officers would leave. Both stayed on the shoulder with the paramedics as the tow truck rigging was secured.
Rankin watched as the cable rewound even slower than when it was pulled out. “It seemed to take forever.”
Once the chains and cable tightened, the badly damage Toyota Corolla made its muddy way out of the hole.
“Magically,” as Enright recalled it, the front tire caught the bank and slowly the car flipped over.
“That door fell open and there she was,” he said.
Ashlyn was flopped over onto the passenger seat. Her heart had stopped. She wasn’t moving.
“I see one body still in her seatbelt — wet, soggy,” Enright said. “I know it’s a girl. I know she’s not old. I know she’s fairly young. And she’s somebody’s daughter.”
The firefighters cut Ashlyn’s seatbelts and gently pulled her out, put her on a spinal board and passed her along the gauntlet of rescuers, up the slippery slope to the ambulance.
They all knew the outlook was bleak.
“I remember thinking to myself at that point in time, ‘If nothing else, harvest organs,’” Enright said, his voice breaking. “We were quick, but she was cold.”
At the end of the line, passing the board up the ditch to the paramedics was Reintjes. Ashlyn’s coat hood was covering her face. He pulled it back.
She had a “fixed stare,” he said. “She is pale as can be, lips are blue … and her hair is all wet, mud on her.”
He’d seen that look before in years of policing and on military battlefields.
“I said to somebody, ‘She’s gone.’ “
The car was out of the water at 22:16 — 24 minutes after the first dispatch. Ashlyn was on a stretcher after 27 minutes.
The paramedics took over and began cardiopulmonary resuscitation, CPR, on the lifeless body. Reintjes searched through the car and found Ashlyn’s purse in the wheel well of the passenger side where it had been thrown during the crash.
As Ashlyn was put in the ambulance, the paramedics kept up chest compressions. They drove away in minutes, with Haidar as a police escort to London’s Victoria Hospital. Haidar had finally agreed to go to hospital.
Graham spoke to Ashlyn’s brother, Dustin Skopnik, on the phone after the Waterloo Regional Police had knocked on the door of the family’s home. He told him Ashlyn had been in an accident.
He said they needed to get to the London hospital.
Ashlyn’s brother told Graham that Ashlyn had been travelling alone — a big relief for the officers combing the area for a possible second passenger.
At the crash scene, the firefighters packed up their trucks and circled around Chief Braatz for their routine debrief after a critical incident. While the urgency had subsided, the reality of another pending 401 tragedy lingered in the frigid air.
Then, something extraordinary happened once Ashlyn was rushed away.
“All the calls for service stopped,” Rankin said. “Ashlyn’s collision was the last collision. Someone was looking after us.”
About 20 minutes after the ambulance had left, a call came from Haidar to Graham with news they never expected.
“They got a pulse.”
Friday: The Revival
THAT DOOR FELL OPEN AND THERE SHE WAS.