Written by Blake Mathews
A car accident Sunday night sent one Harding freshman to the hospital, a truck to the junkyard and independent news reports rippling through the student body.
Freshman Cory Griffin was driving his 1999 GMC Sierra truck down the Bebee Capps Expressway around 10:30 p.m. He was about to turn onto Burks Drive, which runs between the Reynolds building and the Ganus Athletic Center on the south side of campus, when he said he saw two figures run into the road.
“A boy and a girl ran out in front of me and momentarily stopped,” Griffin said. The couple appeared to be college students, and the male grabbed the female’s hand and quickly pulled her out of the street. But they were not fast enough, and Griffin said he only avoided the pair by accelerating and throwing his steering wheel hard to the right.
The maneuver may have saved the couple, but it sent Griffin’s truck hurtling into a tree.
“I just remember seeing ‘boy and girl,’ ‘tree’ and then ‘dark sky,'” he said. “I don’t even remember getting out of my truck.”
Griffin said he blacked out at the moment of impact. When he regained consciousness, senior Devan Lemrick was holding his head in her hands, trying to keep his neck still in case his spine had been injured. Griffin said he was very grateful for her help, though at the time he was feeling overcome with “pain, sadness and anger all at the same time.”
“I thought I had died, but I kept hearing this voice saying ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,'” he said.
But his truck was not okay. The tree, which Griffin said was “about the size of a leg,” left a 12-inch indentation in the front of his car, moved back the engine block, rolled back the hood and bent the frame. The truck, which Griffin had been driving for about a year and a half, was his first vehicle, and his very first wreck left totaled it.
A few other students had gathered at the scene of the accident; Griffin said one must have called for help because paramedics arrived a few minutes after he woke up in the street. The EMTs strapped him to a stretcher and loaded him into the ambulance, where he remained for several minutes while a police officer questioned him about the accident.
Griffin was then driven to White County Medical Center. Doctors determined that he had contusions along his left arm and leg and a concussion from the impact, but Griffin said he was released about two and a half hours later. From there he went to stay with an aunt who lives in Searcy and waited for his parents to arrive. At 2 a.m., once his family knew he was safe, Griffin traveled back to campus and spent the rest of the night in his dorm room.
That night ended up lasting for a full day, as Griffin said he was so emotionally and physically drained that he slept for over 24 straight hours. He says he feels no pain from the bruises or the concussion, though he complains that he still has “partial numbness” in his left hand.
“I can’t really feel my fingers,” Griffin said.
The days since the accident have been “low-key” for Griffin, who only talked to close friends about the accident. He had heard a rumor that someone had been taking pictures of his wrecked vehicle and posting about it on Facebook. At the heart of that rumor was junior and electronic media production major LaRell Reynolds, who covered the event as a reporter.
Reynolds said he was walking to his car in the Reynolds building parking lot when he heard the ambulances arrive on the scene. He said he immediately thought of the spot news assignment from his photography class, which required him to capture a breaking news story on camera. But his phone had a low battery, so Reynolds called a friend with a digital camera out to the scene of the accident.
When Reynolds got to the wreck, Griffin was being carried into the ambulance. Peering through the windows into the back of the ambulance, Reynolds saw Griffin “laying down, not responding at all.” At first, he was not sure the accident victim had survived.
“I was thinking that this could be really serious or not,” Reynolds said. “If it were serious they would have left, but … he’s not moving.”
As he snapped pictures of the wreck and the EMTs, Reynolds said he was approached by passersby and called by friends who saw him near the wreck. They all wanted to know what had happened.
“I was like, ‘Well, since I work for the news, I might as well put this on Facebook,'” he said. After Harding Public Safety asked him to leave the scene, Reynolds went back to his room and started spreading the news through his Facebook statuses.
“The crash happened around 10:40 with no witnesses. The male body was last seen inside an ambulance where his physical state is unknown,” Reynolds said in his Facebook status at 11:27 that night. As the minutes passed and more information came to light, he updated his status accordingly and eventually uploaded his pictures of the wreck.
Several of the posts received attention from other students, who discussed the details of the event with Reynolds through Facebook’s comment feature. Within a few hours, word was out and circulating that a male student with “brownish hair and a goatee/beard … wearing brownish shoes” had crashed his “gold/silver truck” into a tree.
On Wednesday, Griffin said he still had not met Reynolds or seen his news bulletins on Facebook.
As for his truck, Griffin said it was towed away shortly after the crash. The only thing he went back to collect was the steering wheel cover, which had come with the truck when he bought it used. Stitched into the cover was the name “Betty” in silver letters, and Griffin said he had named his truck accordingly. The cover will transfer to the wheel of Griffin’s future vehicle, which he plans to name “Betty 2.”
