“I was shaking so hard I forgot how my phone worked,” Ana Simmon said Wednesday morning, standing near 2100 South and 400 East, the spot where a truck had crashed into her family as they walked home from trick-or-treating two years earlier.
The truck driver hadn’t seen Simmon’s father, husband or the wagon carrying three children. The truck turned left into the crosswalk and struck the wagon just after 7 p.m. on Halloween, she said. She held the hands of her now-5-year-olds as she recounted the details of the crash, in hopes that her story might encourage drivers to be extra aware of pedestrians on Halloween.
The wagon absorbed most of the truck’s force, and the children — Simmon’s twins and niece — tumbled onto the road, she said.
Because the kids were with Simmon’s husband and father, she was strolling half a block behind, with her sister and brother-in-law, when the crash happened. They heard the crash, saw the commotion and ran toward the crosswalk.
Simmon remembers seeing the wings of her 3-year-old daughter’s Buzz Lightyear costume lying in the road. She got to the children before her sister Amy Davis, who was seven months pregnant at the time.
Davis remembers screams and chaos, and then hearing her sister’s voice in the cacophony.
“It‘s them, it’s them, it’s them!” Davis recalled her sister screaming.
In the truck’s headlights, Davis could see the wagon the children had been in, wedged under the truck’s bumper.
An off-duty paramedic held Davis’ 1½-year-old daughter while they waited for the ambulance, Davis said.
“I remember a lot of yelling,” Davis said. “The driver was yelling how sorry he was, my dad was yelling at the driver. It was chaos. It was absolute chaos.”
The crash also knocked the cowboy boots off of Simmon’s 3-year-old son, who was dressed as Lightyear’s “Toy Story” companion Woody, she said.
“I remember his bare feet wiggling as they put him into the ambulance,” she said. Her husband, Keith Simmon, broke several bones in the crash. Her son was left with a black eye, and her daughter had abrasions on her face.
Davis’s daughter fractured her skull.
Everyone who was struck has recovered from the crash.
“It was a nightmare,” Davis said. “We were being safe, and it still happened to us.”
Now, Simmon said, she dresses her children in reflective costumes. She and her husband plan to wear reflective vests when they take them trick-or-treating this year.
“Every year, without fail, we see trick-or-treaters that are severely injured or killed as a result of being hit by vehicles,” UDOT spokesman John Gleason said. “So we want to remind parents to do everything that we can to protect our kids.”
That means dressing children in reflective gear and carrying flashlights, Gleason said.
“Even more so than that, we have a conversation with kids that even if you have the right of way, if you‘re in a crosswalk, don’t assume that drivers can see you, or that they’re going to stop for you, because many times they don’t see you,” Gleason said. “Many times they’re distracted.”
More auto-pedestrian crashes occur in October because there are fewer daylight hours, but it’s still warm enough that people walk more than in winter months.
“It‘s a dangerous combination,” Gleason said.
There were no fatal auto-pedestrian crashes on Halloween 2016, he said, but there was one the day before and one the day after. In 2015, there were two fatalities as a result of auto-pedestrian crashes.
“It‘s critical that we have a culture change,” Gleason said. “Because if something isn’t done, we’re going to see more and more not only pedestrian fatalities, but also traffic fatalities in general as a result of distracted driving.”
Simmon and Davis focus on dressing their children in bright costumes so they are seen, but they can only prevent so much.
”It wasn‘t the fact that they weren’t visible,” Simmon said. “It was the fact that he wasn’t looking.”