Miracle survivor continues to amaze
Published: June 12, 2006
A death-defying truck driver shocked dozens of onlookers a month ago by not only surviving a two-semi truck accident south of Longmont, but also by dragging his own mangled body out of a heap of metal, glass and diesel fuel that once served as the truck’s cab.
Two weeks later, the seemingly invincible 58-year-old Denver man — still picking out shards of glass embedded in his skin — continued to amaze friends as he danced with his daughter at her quinceañera, or 15th birthday party.
“I’m still here,” Jose Aguilar-Alvarado said in Spanish, relaxing under a tree outside his apartment complex in Aurora. “I’m really big. They still don’t want me upstairs.”
On May 11, Aguilar-Alvarado was following an acquaintance working for a different trucking company, Juan Olivas-Muñiz, from a Denver landscaping supply yard to a construction site in Longmont.
Each truck carried 20 tons of dirt. Combined, the men were steering a combined 164,000 pounds at about 55 mph north on U.S. Highway 287.
At 11:30 a.m., Olivas-Muñiz slowed to a near-stop at a yellow light at Niwot Road. Aguilar-Alvarado said he, too, had started braking, but that’s the last thing he remembered for two days.
Onlookers, however, saw Aguilar-Alvarado’s cab slam into the semi in front of him at full speed. They heard the massive impact of crunching metal that left his cab looking like an industrial tossed salad.
Then — “inconceivably,” as witnesses described it — they heard Aguilar-
Alvarado’s voice pleading for help and his body clawing its way out.
“That’s the luckiest man alive,” witness David Laber said at the time. State troopers, who later ticketed Aguilar-Alvarado for careless driving, said he was not wearing a seat belt but was saved by an airbag.
“They kept saying it was a miracle I was alive, that it couldn’t be,” Aguilar-Alvarado recalled of comments his wife, two stepdaughters and friends had made at his bedside at Longmont United Hospital. Aguilar-Alvarado’s eyes were still swollen shut at the time, so he couldn’t say how many people visited him before his release two days later.
On May 13, the accident survivor went home with a cracked forehead, a broken nose and ribs, and stitches in his face.
“All my friends say I’m a newborn, but I just keep on living as if nothing had happened,” Aguilar-Alvarado said, shrugging. “What are you going to do?”
The Durango, Mexico, native has lived in the United States for the past 30 years and survived three heart attacks in the 1990s.
Other than an odd job here and there — the ill-fated truck driving job was the first he’s taken in years, he says — Aguilar-Alvarado lives off a Social Security pension and his wife’s wages as a factory worker.
The dirt-hauling job came at the request of his sister-in-law, Rosa Morales, who had remortgaged her house in February to buy her first semi-trailer.
Though her brother-in-law lived, her investment was towed to the dump. The single mother of two now wonders how she’ll make ends meet with a $7,000 deficit on the semi left uncovered by insurance, and medical bills from Longmont United Hospital she’ll be expected to pay.
On Monday, Morales took her nieces — Aguilar-Alvarado’s stepdaughters — to an electronics store to return a computer she had bought for high school assignments. Soon she’ll pawn items from her apartment.
“So much hard work, and for what? It all ended in one moment. It would only be worse if this man wasn’t here,” Morales said in Spanish, crying and pointing to her brother-in-law. “Thank God. But now come the bills.”
While Morales lost her bet on a better life, she said she’ll never forget the moment she pulled back the sheet covering Aguilar-Alvarado’s unrecognizable face at the hospital. Doctor’s had not yet found an interpreter, and with no one to tell her otherwise, Morales felt sure her sister was a widow.
“For that which is material, there is a fix,” she said, “but not for life.”
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