Runaway carriage reined in by hero
Published: April 25, 2007
William Basler didn’t stop to think when he saw a runaway carriage careening through Downtown Indianapolis on Sunday afternoon.
He took off, bolting after the driverless carriage. When he couldn’t catch up, a cab driver offered him a ride. That got the 19-year-old close enough to leap onto the carriage, sweep the reins off the ground and bring the horse to a halt, about four blocks from where the adventure began.
The two young female passengers, visiting Indianapolis from Louisville, Ky., were shaken and sore but not seriously hurt.
After the late-afternoon excitement, Basler was hailed as a hero and besieged by reporters.
“It was just instinct,” he said later. “I was just worried about the people inside of it.”
The incident began about 4:40 p.m. near the intersection of Illinois and Washington streets, when a suspected drunken driver hit the Yellow Rose Carriage buggy.
Basler had stepped out of a restaurant at Circle Centre mall for a smoke when he heard the crash, turned and saw carriage driver Kathleen Moriarty, 53, fall to the ground from her perch.
“The carriage driver lady just flew off the carriage,” he said.
Police reported she was briefly unconscious but not seriously hurt.
Then, a rail on the side of the carriage snapped and the horse took off, Basler said.
He ran after the carriage as fast as he could, Basler said, but wasn’t catching up. A taxi driver saw what was going on, slowed and told Basler to jump in. The cab sped up and passed the carriage, northbound on Illinois, and Basler jumped out of the cab and onto the carriage near Ohio Street.
That’s when he realized the reins were dragging the ground. He wrapped a leg around something to secure himself and bent down to pick up the reins. Once he had them, he leaned back and began yelling “Whoa!” A motorist pulled alongside and also was yelling “Whoa!” to help out, he recalled.
The horse stopped so quickly the carriage slammed into it, which spooked the animal all over again, Basler said. He tried again to rein it in, and this time the horse gradually came to a stop near New York Street.
Basler, a Northeastside resident, said the women in the carriage were clearly shaken up by the wild ride.
Sgt. Matthew Mount, spokesman for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, said the passengers, Christie Dudley, 26, and Stacey Taylor, 28, both from Louisville, complained of some pain. Mount said they and Moriarty were checked out at Methodist Hospital and did not have any broken bones or major injuries.
The driver of the van that hit the buggy was taken to Wishard Memorial Hospital and faces several preliminary charges. Timothy D. Carlson, 46, 1400 block of Central Avenue, was arrested on preliminary charges of felony possession of a controlled substance, misdemeanor charges of driving under the influence, public intoxication and operating a vehicle while never having received a license.
Carlson has a prior DUI conviction from 1999, police said. It was unclear how much damage the carriage sustained, but it still seemed to move pretty well. The horse was not injured.
Basler, who dropped out of Broad Ripple High School when he was 16, is now working on his high school equivalency, is looking for a job and hopes to save up enough to go to college.
Experienced with horses? Not so much.
“When I was 15, I rode a horse once, and before I rode it, they trained me how to stop it,” he said. “When I went through that training, I never thought it would come in handy, but it did.”
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