All Samantha Moore remembers is headlights coming toward her new Kia Soul — and then a big flash.
“I think about that phone call that my mom got, that I had been in a head-on crash, that I was being (airlifted to the hospital) — and that it wasn’t very likely that I would survive,” Moore said.
Her heart stopped during the flight, but, with much medical intervention, she miraculously survived.
People read about drunken drivers and car crashes, Moore said. But rarely do they learn the aftereffects that ripple through the life of a person injured by a drunken driver — or how others are affected.
Alton Angel, for example, drives a flatbed truck for Ken’s Towing in Hilo. He retrieves vehicles too severely damaged for towing and helps clean up the aftermath of alcohol-related crashes.
“It still gets my heart,” he said. “Even though it’s not my family members, it still hurts.”
Cynthia Honma, office administrator at Ken’s, said after nearly 40 years in the towing business, Ken’s workers have seen many families stop in to retrieve personal effects of an injured or deceased loved one from a crumpled vehicle.
“It’s definitely something that does leave an imprint on our hearts,” Honma said.
Moore’s crash happened March 6, 2010. The drunken driver who hit her was killed, and Moore’s passenger was seriously injured.
She said it seemed afterward as if she was plucked from the life she was leading and placed instead in some other life that didn’t belong to her.
The crash broke her back, poked her ribs into her lungs, lacerated her liver, broke her pelvis, broke both of her legs and shoved crushed sinus bones into her brain.
She lost 45 pounds during recovery, dropping from 120 pounds before the crash to just 75.
During the first three days following the accident, eight surgeries were performed to keep her alive and repair damage.
She struggled to make sense of what happened.
“The guy was dead. I couldn’t ask him,” she said.
Anger produced significant stress. But there was nobody to direct the anger toward.
She was told she could file a lawsuit against the uninsured drunken driver’s family. But she understood that they, too, suffered a loss.
She learned the drunken driver experienced the death of a loved one not long before the crash. That revelation helped her to forgive.
Now, she takes flowers to the crash site each year.
Earlier this month, she stood with her 3-year-old son, John-Roger, near a display of her smashed car at Ken’s Towing, which annually displays vehicles like hers during the holidays as a reminder that drinking and driving is dangerous.
The message “Happy Holidays. Don’t Drink and Drive” was scrawled on one of the car’s windows.
“It’s such a simple thing,” Angel said.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving reports 290,00 people were injured nationwide in 2016 in drunken driving crashes.
This year, through Dec. 3, the Hawaii Police Department reports 1,070 DUI arrests have been made in Hawaii County. About one-fourth of the 23 people arrested for DUI in the county Nov. 27-Dec. 3 were involved in a crash.
Like Moore, many of the individuals injured in drunken driving incidents face long roads of recovery, vehicle damage and time away from work or school.
After the crash, Moore had to relearn how to eat, sleep, talk and walk.
She was motivated to start nursing school by the care she received while undergoing recuperative therapy.
“What Samantha has that’s very special is that she can always see something in every patient to love, or to like at least, and that’s a very special quality to have,” said Moore’s nursing instructor, Cheryl Pavel.
While attending college, Moore also works in the Hilo Medical Center emergency department, helping enter physician notes.
When she made the dean’s list at Hawaii Community College, she suddenly felt like maybe she could succeed, despite the injuries to her brain.
“My car accident no longer defined me.” she said.
The saying that “life is what you make of it” is “100 percent true,” Moore said.
Email Jeff Hansel at jhansel@hawaiitribune-herald.com.