THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, June 17, 1996 TAG: 9606170036
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEVE STONE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 108 lines
After a Chevrolet Monte Carlo sped past his home Sunday, Donny R. Jordan heard the telltale squeal of tires as it rounded a sharp turn. And then the crash.
Within minutes, Jordan and neighbor Mary Foley were struggling to bring life back to a woman he had pulled from the wrecked car, partially submerged in a roadside ditch. They won, reviving the woman with CPR.
Not long after, Foley took her children to the crash scene.
``I showed them the car and showed them what drinking and driving can do,'' Foley, 37, said. ``Ditches don't move and the road is not forgiving.''
And she wondered if the woman whose life had been spared and the man who was trapped in the wreck with her would realize their good fortune.
``She was full of a lot of murky water, grass and bugs,'' Foley said Sunday evening. ``I wish I had a video so she could see for herself how lucky they were.''
Police credited the neighbors' swift reaction with averting tragedy.
``This accident did involve alcohol and high speed on a very narrow, winding country road,'' police spokesman Lou Thurston said. ``The neighbors. .
The accident happened about 4 p.m. in the 1700 block of Flanagans Lane in Sandbridge, Thurston said. The Monte Carlo, heading west, went off the road and overturned in a ditch filled with storm runoff.
``The woman was under water for several minutes,'' Thurston said.
The driver, identified as Dean Edwin Clark, 34, of the 1700 block of Bernstein Drive, was charged with second-offense DUI and reckless driving. He was being held without bond in the city jail Sunday night.
His wife, Christy Lynn Clark, 37, was being treated at Virginia Beach General Hospital.
In a strange twist, a second man also was charged with second-offense DUI when he drove into the accident scene despite police warnings.
He was identified as Wayne Steven Gibbs, 43, of the 1200 block of Sandbridge Road.
Jordan, a 34-year-old cable contractor, said he was working in his yard when he first saw the car speed by.
``They skidded around the first corner down here, but they didn't make it through the second,'' Jordan said. ``I heard the crash.''
It had happened about 200 yards down the road, so Jordan jumped into his vehicle and drove to the scene.
``The vehicle was in a ditch, submerged in water,'' Jordan said. He called 911 from his car phone, then jumped out and ran to the overturned car. Already, a foot of water had seeped in and the car was still sinking in the storm-flooded ditch.
``I could see two people,'' Jordan said. ``There was a man in the back seat sitting up and the female - I could see her legs and backside, the rest (of her) was submerged. . . . I knew someone had to get to that girl quick.''
He shouted to a dazed Dean Clark, asking how many people were in the car. The victim, ``clearly in shock,'' Jordan said, first said three, then two. ``That scared me because I was afraid there was a child in there I couldn't see.''
Jordan tried pulling open the doors, but they were jammed.
``A neighbor boy had run up, and I told him to go back and get a hammer or something that I could use to break the window.'' The boy, 10-year-old Patrick Foley, alerted his parents, Mary and Tim Foley. They brought a sledge hammer.
Jordan told Dean Clark to sit back from the window and he took a swing. The glass shattered and he kicked away the remaining pieces, clearing an exit.
``I pulled the man out and handed him off to someone behind me and then I reached in for the female,'' Jordan said. He also felt around in the water, trying to locate anyone else who might have been in the car.
As he worked, the water continued to rise. Finally, he got a grip on Christy Clark and pulled her out.
``She didn't have any pulse,'' Jordan said. ``She wasn't breathing or nothing.''
Jordan and Mary Foley started giving her CPR. Jordan concentrated on mouth-to-mouth while Foley worked at forcing water out of her lungs and getting her heart beating again. It didn't look good.
``She was completely blue, eyes rolled back, not breathing, the whole bit,'' Mary Foley said. Jordan added: ``We could tell she'd taken in a lot of water.''
Foley, who took CPR classes because she thought it was a good thing for a mother to know, found herself struggling to remember and apply what she had learned.
A paramedic in a car showed up and Foley looked to him for help, fearing she was doing it all wrong. As he radioed for more help, he assured her she was doing fine. ``He just said, `Keep doing what you're doing.' ''
Then, Jordan said, ``within two to three minutes we got a pulse and she started breathing.''
Jordan was almost matter-of-fact as he related the tale Sunday afternoon.
``It feels pretty good that you saved someone's life,'' he conceded. But he's been there before. ``I'm from Oklahoma and we've just been here a couple months,'' he explained.
``I was a reserve police officer there, and it's happened to me several times.''
As for Foley, ``It was her first time, and she was pretty shook up,'' Jordan said. ``But we stuck together and got her going and breathing again.'' He said the two people in the car were ``pretty fortunate it happened in daytime and that someone could see and hear it happen.''
Foley said she was ``just glad we could do something,'' and insisted that praise be shared with all the people who came to help, including neighborhood children.
``It was very traumatic for the children,'' she said.
``They stayed back, which was good, but they could see us kneeling over her. They knew what was going on.''
She decided to take son Patrick; 8-year-old daughter, Shannon; and their cousin, Justine Ward, 9, back to the scene.
``I wanted to show them how bad it can get,'' she said.
In retrospect, ``I learned a lot,'' Foley said. ``And I'm ready for the next one. But I don't want to go through it.''
KEYWORDS: ACCIDENT TRAFFIC RESCUE CPR
DRUNKEN DRIVING ARREST by CNB