An angel on the interstate appeared, saving biker’s life
Published: August 16, 2007
I am going to guess that even if I could find her, she probably wouldn’t talk anyway.
The last thing people who do such things ever seek is attention called to themselves. And, yes, she did a very good thing.
A man lay in the road. There was blood everywhere. Dozens of people watched it, the same way she had. She was the only one who did anything.
It was early afternoon last Saturday when Richard Green and his buddy, Charlie Aubuchon, set out from Colorado Springs on their Harley-Davidson motorcycles for a quick road trip to Wyoming.
Richard Green had just turned 50, so it was a bit of a celebratory ride.
“We were just going to air out the bikes, cross the border and turn them right around,” Richard Green said.
They were headed northbound on Interstate 25 just outside of Loveland when they crested a hill and saw a massive traffic back-up.
“I tried to stop the bike first, but the back wheel locked up on me and I started to fishtail,” Richard Green recalled.
“The only thing at that point I figured I could do is lay it down, or run smack into those cars and take the express elevator right up.”
The problem was that for the first time since he began riding motorcycles, which dates back to when he was a teenager, Richard Green, an appliance service technician, wasn’t wearing either his helmet or his riding leathers.
He laid it down.
He remembers the initial shower of sparks from the floorboard and wheels flying past him as he slid on his backside down the highway.
They later told him he had slid some 50 yards when he and the bike slammed into something on the road.
“I remember hitting something, and me and the bike getting flipped into the air, me getting thrown through the air like a rag doll.
“The next thing I know, she was holding me.”
No one, it seems, knows who she was.
But Richard Green and his sister, Rhonda Brewer, believe she saved his life.
“He remembers nothing of the woman except her face, her red hair and that she wore glasses,” Rhonda Brewer, a Tucson, Ariz., artist, says of her younger brother.
“She was holding his head in her lap, telling him not to move, that the paramedics were coming. She was the last thing he remembers until he awoke again in the ambulance.”
The back-up, Richard Green later discovered, was the result of a six-car collision on the interstate. Everyone else sat in their cars. She rushed immediately to his aid.
And he needed it badly.
His head had been smashed. It would take doctors 11 staples to close the ragged bits of flesh. He smashed six ribs on his left side, one of which punctured his lung. He had pulverized his clavicle.
“If someone hadn’t helped him, he would have bled to death,” his sister said. “But there was this angel on the highway, this wonderful spirit, who in that mass confusion on the highway thought not of herself.”
She kept telling Richard Green over and over that he would be OK. He remembers her smiling all the time at him.
“I remember she kept telling me not to move my head,” Richard Green said. “She thought I had maybe broken my spine, and kept trying to calm me down because I was pretty shook up.”
What happened to Charlie Aubuchon?
He was riding just behind Richard Green. When he crested the hill on his bike, he was able to slam on his brakes.
“Mostly he was making phone calls, getting people there and basically making sure nobody ran me over lying there in the road.”
He was discharged from Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland on Thursday. Of his motorcycle, he says, “she came out of it a lot better than I did.”
The kicker of the story occurred a few days ago when Richard Green still lay unconscious in the intensive care unit.
On his bedside lay a brand new Harley-Davidson T-shirt, identical to the one the paramedics had cut from him as he lay on the interstate.
The nurses told him a woman had dropped it off for him. Yes, she had red hair and wore glasses.
“I would tell her thanks for all your help,” Richard Green said. “If she hadn’t been there . . . ”
His sister, Rhonda Brewer, put it this way:
“All we hear about these days are terrible awful things. What a wonderful thing she did. People just don’t do this anymore.
“We’re so thankful, the family, that she was there to help him. I would ask her when she got her wings, to tell her thank you, that she really was an angel on the highway.”
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