Sean C. Morgan
Bad luck for a Sweet Home woman turned out to be a miracle for a seriously injured 23-year-old Sweet Home man trapped in his car for more than six hours on Nov. 2.
Robert Hooper of Allstar Auto responded to Janey Kathleen Smith’s call for help.
Her car was broken down at about milepost 25 on Highway 20 west of Sweet Home, on the north side of the roadway at the west end of the narrows.
That was the best place on the entire planet for Stephen Alexander Akkerman, 23, of Sweet Home. He was trapped there in his Chevrolet Cavalier.
“Just as you’re making that last turn, I was putting on the gas,” Smith said. “All of a sudden, I didn’t have any pedal.”
She coasted to the westbound shoulder just past the end of the guardrail. She and her passenger Roger Walters, visiting from Ketchikan, Alaska, fiddled with the car for a few minutes trying to figure out why it lost power.
“We got a call for a broken down vehicle right at milepost 25,” Hooper said. His boss sent him out to bring the vehicle back to town.
He arrived and started loading the car onto the truck, he said. Smith and Walters walked around to the passenger side of their vehicle.
“I heard her yell there was a car down the side of the bank,” Hooper said.
“I was just looking over, and then all of the sudden, I saw that blue car,” Smith said. “So I ran over.”
She ran to the shoulder just above the car and called 9-1-1. She could see there was no tape or tags on the vehicle, something she would have expected to find had police already seen the vehicle.
“I thought maybe there was somebody in it,” Smith said.
“She was very adamant that there was something wrong,” Hooper said.
“It didn’t look bad at all,” Hooper said. It just looked like someone had gone off the edge of the road and probably walked away. That’s something he’s seen plenty of driving tow truck.
The passenger side of the car looked relatively undamaged. That’s the side visible from above.
He walked toward the car along the trail it left down the hillside. He looked inside and saw what looked like a man’s leg.
“I turned around, and the couple said they were already on the phone,” Hooper said. “I told them to tell them there was a body. I let them know there’s a body in the car.”
Hooper went around to the other side of the car to see what it had hit.
“You could see through the brush, he was half hanging out,” Hooper said. “He looked like he’d been there awhile. I looked, stepped backward. That’s when his hand moved.”
At that instant Hooper experienced a flood of emotions he said can’t even describe.
“I yell up to the couple, ‘He’s still alive,’” Hooper said. Hooper started breaking branches to get to Akkerman, and he called 9-1-1 himself. He didn’t know if Smith and Walters were aware of the urgency.
“He (Akkerman) told him, ‘If you could get this stuff off my chest, I can get out myself,” Walters said.
He was wedged between the driver’s seat and the front quarter panel, which was crushed and moved by a tree stump, Hooper said.
The steering wheel had been shoved to the right of the driver’s seat. He kept telling Hooper that if he would push it off of him he could get out.
“He kept mumbling,” Hooper said. “I said, ‘Stop moving.’ It hurt him to move. I said, ‘It’s almost over. Help’s on the way. You’re done. You’ve got a few more minutes of this left. I said the things I think I’d want to hear.”
Sweet Home medics and rescue workers responded and extricated Akkerman from the car using the jaws of life.
“They got there really fast,” Hooper said.
Hooper said the odds of finding Akkerman were astronomical. He was so far below the roadway that his vehicle could not be seen. While talking to a reporter at the site later, Hooper and the reporter could barely see the tops of log trucks passing by above the guardrail.
Smith’s mechanical trouble, the key event leading to Akkerman’s rescue, was minor.
“A little cable to the gas pedal broke,” Walters said.
“It was just divine intervention, I guess,” Smith said.
“You never think of it happening to you,” Walters said. It’s the kind of thing seen on TV.
Akkerman apparently had been there for more than six hours.
As Hooper understands it, Akkerman got off of work in Albany at about 5 a.m. He probably reached the area at around 5:45 a.m. Medics and a state trooper were dispatched at about 12:15 p.m.
“I’m really happy that we were able to get out there and get him out,” Hooper said.
Medics transported Akkerman to Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis, where he was in intensive care.
According to the state police report, roadway evidence indicated the vehicle was traveling east on Highway 20 when it crossed through the westbound lanes onto the shoulder and down the embankment, where it collided with a stump.
Akkerman had been wearing a seatbelt.