New York City Suicide

When I was 19, some friends and I were visiting New York City. After picking them up from the airport, we decided it would be fun to drive down Broadway at night and see it all lit up. It was fun, we got some good pictures from the car, and around 8:30, we decided to drive home.

Going northbound on the West Henry Hudson, we were talking and listening to some Journey, when someone hopped the highway divider and ran right out in front of my car, stopped, and looked right at us. There was no time to stop, no time to swerve, and at 50 miles per hour he came crashing straight through the front windshield, hitting my best friend directly in the face. Immediately, I pulled over and called the police, then went to look to see if there was any slim chance the man might still be alive. I saw his leg, severed roughly four to six inches above the knee, on the road near where my car had stopped.

My friend in the backseat was crying her eyes out, and my buddy was amped on adrenaline and shock in the front seat waiting for the police to arrive and remove him from the car. Walking further back, I saw a bunch of people who had stopped to help crowded around the man, I saw his head caved in and a dark pool underneath him before a kind old gentleman turned me away, saying “You don’t need to see this.” In almost no time at all, the fire department was there helping my friend (who had a broken nose and shards of glass embedded in his eyes and face) out of the car. When the ambulance arrived, they tried to put him in with the man I had hit, which made him freak out and refuse, and wait for another ambulance.

The cops on the scene took down my story and ran a breathalyzer on me, but I hadn’t been drinking then put my friend from the backseat and I in the back of a car to try to calm us down while they waited for the investigators to arrive. I had called my mom, who lived outside the city, to tell her I had been in an accident and that she should come for support.

After about an hour, the investigators arrived, took time marking off the scene, and interviewed us again about what had happened (the police were very nice, and all of us were in shock). After interviewing me, I asked the investigator where I could go to the bathroom. He nodded to the trees on the side of the highway, and said to have at it. So I stood on the dimly lit bloody highway near the trees, and under the watchful eye of the 50 block traffic jam I had created, let forth a piss I had been holding in for hours.

Afterwards, they took us back to the local precinct to finish paperwork and meet up with my mom and sisters who were waiting there (after having left my stepbrother with my friend who had been taken to the hospital. They had gotten lost and caught in the same traffic I caused, which is why they didn’t meet us at the scene). With the paperwork done, my mom asked what had happened to the man. The officer looked at my little sisters and then asked my mom and I to step outside. “He was DOA. He had been released from prison that morning.” I was shocked when he extended his hand to me and thanked me for helping to “clean up the city”.

After going to the hospital to get my friend and step-brother, we went home for the evening. The next day, when we picked up my car from the auto shop, I saw in the meager sunlight the after-image of what had transpired: blood and brain matter all over the front of my car, an imploded front windshield, and, entering the car to take it to a place to get the glass repaired, a large chunk of bloody skull in the passenger’s seat next to me, hidden under some napkins.

My friend who had been in the passenger’s seat wandered over, and I told him not to look inside, but he wouldn’t listen and did anyway. I think that is when the reality of what had happened sunk in for him, because his eyes grew large and he turned around silently to go sit in my mom’s car. The entire experience was completely surreal, especially during the drive to get the windshield repaired, when alone, I drove the car to the shop, the wind whistling through the broken glass.