![]() ![]() One afternoon, I called a man named Ahmad. When I started again, I imagined myself better at it, more empathetic. I stopped covering accidents for a while after mine. If we’re in control, then we must be responsible. Being in a serious accident, she told me, “violates our beliefs about how life should be and who we are.” We think we’re in control of what happens on the road. Gayle Beck, a psychology professor at the University of Memphis, is one of a handful of researchers who studies PTSD linked to car wrecks. Symptoms: frequent, intrusive thoughts or dreams about the accident fear of driving feeling isolated even from close loved ones insomnia-and intense guilt, whether the person was at fault or not. Much later, I came across a study in which researchers found that almost 40 percent of people involved in car accidents developed PTSD. Still, driving left me feeling under siege, half-crazy about the dangers of this thing I did every day. Its four lanes run through leafy neighborhoods, winding past schools, grocery stores, drab strip malls. I took Clairmont Road instead, the slower and, I hoped, safer route. ![]() I avoided driving on the highway to work. On the dashboard, I noticed cuts in the vinyl from when her back had burst through my windshield. Or, if I didn’t see her, I’d imagine her suddenly stepping onto the road. She’d flash ahead of me, a face in the headlights. Nearly every time I drove, I thought I saw the woman I’d hit. They’d failed to “maintain a lane.” They’d switched the radio from talk to music. But there was a key difference: The police said they’d done something wrong. I told the friend that I was just doing my job.Īfter my own wreck, I felt like the stories of people who’d been charged with vehicular homicide could easily have been about me, if the woman I’d hit had died. The teacher was suffering because of what had happened-a death caused by a tiny, common error-and the last thing he’d needed was his mugshot in the paper. A friend of the teacher contacted me to complain about the story. Firefighters found her in critical condition after they cut her out of the mangled van. The van’s driver, a 68-year-old woman, was trapped after the collision. Once, I wrote about a teacher who, according to the authorities, had accidentally turned in front of an oncoming van while entering a parking lot. I wrote most often about vehicular homicides-they were the most serious because they involved a death and an alleged crime, even if that crime was a driver’s momentary failure in judgment. Metro Atlanta has a lot of them: more than 200,000 a year-one every two and a half minutes. For years, my quota was two stories a day, and writing about wrecks was a reliable way to meet it. Leaning on a cane, I limped down the driveway and knocked on the door.Ī s a newspaper reporter, I covered car accidents all the time before my own. One day in 2018, I found her name and an address on the police report. Only after two years and another crash did I finally resolve to learn what had happened to the woman. Flashes of a ruined life flickered in my mind, and I became consumed by a sense of guilt that my friends and family struggled to understand, and that I couldn’t explain. I imagined that she was paralyzed or had serious brain damage. ![]() He said he couldn’t legally tell me anything else about her condition, and I wasn’t sure I could handle knowing. Why didn’t I just swerve?Īn officer called late that night: I could pick up my car. But I couldn’t stop seeing the woman hitting the windshield, seeing myself slamming down on the brake. Two men who’d seen the impact from the next lane over said it. Everyone said the same thing: It wasn’t my fault. I spent the next day on the couch, trying not to cry when people called to check on me. If she died, or appeared likely to die, investigators would need to test the car’s computer system to make sure the data aligned with my statements. The police would impound my car, and if, after 24 hours, it appeared the woman would live, they’d release the vehicle. But when I reached down to pick her up off the road, she moved.Īfter the police arrived, an officer took me aside and told me how the investigation would go. ![]() When my car finally stopped, I raced over to her. Her body crashed into my windshield and her head hit the top of my car before she landed, crumpled, in the middle of the highway. A woman in dark clothing was standing in my lane on Interstate 75. Then she turned her head and my headlights lit her face. From a distance, the dark spot looked like an oil stain. one night in April 2016, and I was heading home from a friend’s house on the outskirts of Atlanta. ![]()
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