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HOLDEN, Millard County — A good Samaritan is speaking out about helping two men involved in a horrific wrong-way crash along Interstate 15 in Millard County last week.
It was about 7 p.m. on April 16 when 911 calls started pouring in about a Tesla traveling at a high rate of speed northbound in the southbound lanes of I-15 near Holden.
"A car just hit head-on with another car on the freeway going the wrong way," said a 911 caller. "One is a Tesla, one is a Volkswagen. It's upside down. The Tesla, the whole entire front is off."
According to UHP, the Tesla was traveling at a high rate of speed going the wrong way when it side-swiped a semitruck and then nearly went head-on with a Volkswagen SUV.
The crash happened a short distance away from Erica Shearer as she was traveling from Saratoga Springs to Las Vegas that day. As a certified nursing assistant, Shearer said she went into medical mode, pulling her car over and helping the two men in the SUV that had rolled several times.
"It's something like I've never seen before. It was almost like out of the movies," Shearer told KSL-TV as she spoke of the scene of debris spread out everywhere. "It looked like Legos, like hundreds of thousands of Legos everywhere."
Shearer said after evaluating their situation, she and another person cut the men's seat belts and pulled them from their SUV, which was on its side. She ended up holding one of the men's broken legs up off the ground for about 20 minutes while waiting for emergency crews to arrive to help with the pain.
"He held my hand. He just said, 'Thank you so much. You are an angel,'" Shearer said with emotion. "He was just so hurt and just to feel his gratitude kind of took me away from (the tragedy of the crash)."
Shearer said it never crossed her mind not to pull over and help.
"I get comfort out of knowing that I'm helping people, and to see something like that and ignore it would be — no," she said.
Shearer said she has now built a friendship with the two men in the SUV, who are both still in the hospital. The driver of the Tesla remains in critical condition.
UHP investigators believe alcohol may have been involved, but said the investigation continues into why the Tesla was in the wrong lanes.
