A 27-year-old Victoria driver remains shaken and confused after she narrowly missed the driver of an on the Trans-Canada Highway on Thursday, leaving a path of injured bodies and twisted metal in his wake.
“It’s been hard to sit with knowing that I could be seriously injured right now if I didn’t notice when I did,” a witness told the Times Colonist on Monday.
Saanich police are investigating whether driver error, confusion, mental health or criminal intent was behind a man speeding north in the highway’s southbound lanes between the Helmcken Road and McKenzie Avenue exits on Thursday evening resulting in three people, including the wrong-way driver, being hospitalized.
The 小蓝视频 government employee, who asked for anonymity out of concern for her safety, had just purchased an item listed in a Facebook Marketplace ad by someone in Langford and was headed home.
She was in the fast lane going south when she tried to process the exact whereabouts of the blur of northbound lights ahead of her.
There were no red tail lights in front of her as reference points to which lane the oncoming lights were in and no one honking to suggest the impending chaos.
Was she seeing what she thought she was seeing?
“I swerved at the last second when I realized, oh no, this is real,” she said.
Cognizant that she was “trapped” — with a concrete median wall immediately on her left and possibly another vehicle in the right lane and another concrete wall — she instinctively swerved right. Dashcam video revealed what happened next.
The wrong-way vehicle imploded with a loud bang as it hit head-on the vehicle directly behind her Ford Escape, causing a chain reaction of carnage.
She pulled off to the shoulder and at 9:08 p.m. she was the first to call 911.
“I remember looking up in my rear view mirror and seeing this puff of smoke,” she said, noting she didn’t even hear the impact perhaps because she was in shock.
“I’m just like, hyperventilating, crying, like I can’t believe what I just saw and wondering are the people behind me okay?” she said.
She was advised to remain in her SUV given it would be the safest place. Another 911 call came in after hers, she was told, and police, fire and ambulance crews were on their way.
She was advised to drive home once safe to do so, but opted to accept help from her neighbours. One of them drove her home and another drove her vehicle home.
“When I got home like it was the most eerie feeling, like should I pinch myself, like it was just some sort of alternate reality where I shouldn’t be here,” she said.
She hasn’t driven since. She already wasn’t a big fan of driving and now she said she keeps seeing headlights in front of her.
The eyewitness told police, family and friends that “the driver was very confident,” noting his vehicle was seemingly steering straight ahead and and accelerating.
“That was the scariest part, is that it felt so intentional,” she said. “I’ve seen crazy cars on the highway but this car seemed to know what it was doing.”
When she arrived home she got a call from a Saanich police officer and while she wasn’t given any details as to what had happened she was reassured that no one had died. She was also given a police file number and told she’d be called back for an official statement.
While she avoided physical injury she’s plagued with all the “what ifs” of how she could have better warned or helped others, and on the other extreme, how she could have died.
“I’m one of those people that want to help others before I help myself … but you have to react in a split second … I just swerved,” she said, relieved no one was driving beside her.
“If I would have taken the hit, maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad for the people behind me,” she said. “Or maybe if I would have honked, but I didn’t have time to honk by the time I realized what was happening.”
“There are no lessons to learn here,” she said. “It’s just be a good defensive driver, have both hands on the wheel because you never know what’s going to happen.”
But even then, what if the driver meant to hit the vehicle behind her and she just escaped due to good luck or timing.
“I’m not religious, but I thought, this feels like a miracle,” she said of walking away physically unscathed.
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