The Stop Sign Accident

Laynie, 1993

Way back in the fall of 1992, various parts of our family were working on the campaign for a man running for the state Senate in South Carolina. We only had two children at the time and, while the oldest child was at school, the baby child (almost 2 years old) and I went to work on the campaign. She was a good baby and I could do things like that with her.

We stayed at campaign headquarters for a few hours doing whatever needed to be done. We needed to be back home before Jared got out of school, so little Laynie and I headed back home. At the last intersection before our driveway, cross traffic had a stop sign. Our road did not. A man drove right on by the stop sign, without stopping, right into the intersection. He later told the police officer, "I stopped, but kept going." Oooookay.

The baby was in the car with me, in the back seat, but on the passenger side in her car seat. When he came through the stop sign, he hit our car on the passenger side, throwing us across the road down into a ditch and up the other side into a fence post at the boundary of a cow pasture. The front of the car was smooshed in so much that I couldn't even get the keys out of the ignition. Our car was totaled. It was a goner, but thankfully Laynie and I survived it.

She was screaming her head off and I was terrified of what I would find when I turned to look back at her. Of course, I did look, but I was afraid that she had been decapitated or something. Illogical, because she was crying, but we'd already had a near-decapitation in an accident that David had during Hurricane Hugo when our oldest son was 3 years old. I will leave that story for him to tell. I crawled back into her seat to check on her and retrieve her. I was scared the car was going to explode or something like they always do on television. While I was trying to get her out of the car, the man driving the car that hit me came over to ask if we were alright. I lit into him but good! "DO I LOOK LIKE I'M ALRIGHT TO YOU?" Who knows what else I said to him, but I'm sure it wasn't pretty.

We were within sight of our driveway when this wreck happened. My parents and sister lived on the same property. My sister was coming home and nearly had a heart attack seeing our car smashed up like that. A few weeks later, I saw this same man driving down the road while we were having to walk (with the children) to a grocery store and everywhere else unless we could get a ride, his car working fine. It made me so mad. He ran the stop sign, yet he still had a car to drive. He broke the law, and I and my daughter paid for it in regards to physical and emotional trauma. Our family paid for it in that we no longer had a car. His careless, irresponsible driving took our independence and freedom for that moment in our lives.

Heavenly Father was with us that day for sure. It could have been so much worse.

Our candidate won, by the way.