Somebody’s going to emergency

I made a quick trip to New York City this weekend. One of my roommates, Laura, had a Sunday flight to Israel out of JFK airport and had decided to go up to NYC a day early. We looked up the schedule for the Mets and Yankees, and since the Mets were in town I decided to tag along so we could cross Shea Stadium off our list of ballparks to visit. Rather than taking the ridiculously overpriced Amtrak train to NYC, we opted for the BoltBus, which picks you up at Metro Center in DC and drops you off near Penn Station in NYC. The buses are clean, comfortable, and have free wi-fi and electrical outlets for those who bring along their laptops. Not bad for $40 roundtrip.

We hailed a cab to take us to our hotel, and ended up with a driver who had absolutely no idea how to get to the hotel, so he spent a majority of his time talking with his dispatcher in order to get directions. We were about five minutes into our ride, when, attempting to make a left hand turn at an intersection, our driver struck a pedestrian who was walking through the crosswalk. The odd thing was, he had slowed down while making the turn, so Laura and I had both assumed he was waiting for the pedestrian to cross so that he could complete the turn. Instead, though, he sped up, and all we heard was the sickening sound of steel hitting flesh, followed by the pedestrian falling to the ground.

All three of us immediately got out of the cab. The pedestrian was a well dressed woman, probably in her mid 60s, who was screaming at the cab driver.

“YOU IDIOT! I HAD A GREEN LIGHT!”

I looked down at her left foot and thought I was going to be sick. It had been run over by the cab’s tire, and the upper half was completely unrecognizable. It was now an indistinguishable mass of exposed flesh, bone, and muscles, with blood slowly pooling all over the asphalt.

Thankfully, Laura is a certified EMT and had been carrying a small bag of supplies in her luggage. She yelled at the cabbie, who was quickly descending into a state of hysteria, to open the trunk so she could reach them. She put on her gloves and began to perform her tasks. A bystander called 911, and another ran off to a nearby apartment building to locate the woman’s husband.

The cabbie, meanwhile, had gone up to the women and was absentmindedly attempting to reattach the sole of her foot, which had been sliced to about halfway down her foot and was now hanging down, exposing the muscles and bone. Laura told him to back off, and he slowly sank to the ground, his back against the cab.
An EMT had been driving by the scene in her SUV and pulled over to see what was going on. About 30 seconds later, three NYPD cars pulled up, followed by a firetruck and ambulance. A cop walked up to me and said in a thick New York accent, “Ma’am, we can’t have any bystanders here. I need you to move to the sidewalk.”

“Oh, I was in that cab.”

“Sarge, we got a witness here.” He nodded in the direction of the cabbie, who was slumped against the cab, head in his hands, and clothes smeared in blood. “That your driver?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, at least he cares that he hit someone.”

The cabbie was now hyperventilating, and a bystander was pouring water over his head, trying to get his attention. Two firefighters tried to get him up on his feet, but he fainted, so they moved him to the sidewalk and began to administer oxygen to him.

The paramedics put the woman on a stretcher and sped off to the hospital. One of the cops got in the cab, which still had the woman’s grocery bag on its hood, and moved it to the side of the street. The firefighters retrieved a bucket of sand and began to spread it over the blood that had collected on the asphalt. Another cop pulled Laura and I to the side and took down our names and contact information. He told us we were now free to go, so we grabbed our bags from the cab.

“So…I guess we should grab another cab?”

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