‘Perfect strangers came together’ in intrepid response to fiery crash


Emergency responders as well as other motorists who stopped to help are credited with saving the lives of Gregory McGee, 62, and Josh Randolph, 31, who were injured in a June 30 crash on Highway 5 south. Shortly before this photo was taken, rescuers pulled McGee from the Chevy Blazer (left) after it burst into flames. The responders then rushed to help stablize Randolph while his partially ejected torso and midsection were pinned under his Chevy Impala (right). Hydraulic extrication equipment was used to lift the mangled vehicle off of him.

Paula Coatney, one of the motorists who stopped to help, said she took this photo to show Randolph later how “perfect strangers” worked to help him.

Both Greg McGee’s SUV, left, and Josh Randolph’s Chevy Impala were total losses after a June 30 collision on Highway 5 south. McGee’s vehicle is identified as a truck is the MSHP online crash report, but first responders say the vehicle was actually a Chevrolet Blazer. Photo courtesy of Ed Doiron

Left: White pavement markings made by Missouri State Highway Patrol investigators after a Feb. 17 fatal crash were still visible last week where the June 30 crash occurred less than 50 yards away on Highway 5. From left: Dobbs, Jacquin and Urich. Times photo/Jessi Dreckman

Ozark County Sheriff’s Deputy Justin Urich, right, worked quickly on June 30 to pick the lock of the Prisen Ranch gates, allowing emergency crews from an air ambulance helicopter that landed in the field behind the gates to access to the crash site and victims. The helicopter landed about 100 yards from the impact site. Times photo/ Jessi Dreckman

Emergency personnel and bystanders are credited with saving the lives of two Gainesville men who sustained major injuries in a June 23 vehicle crash on Highway 5 south near W Highway. 

Paula Coatney and Trisha Hathcock were headed northbound in their two vehicles that Tuesday afternoon at 4 p.m. In between them was Josh Randolph, 31, driving a 2007 Chevy Impala. And coming toward them was a 1999 Chevy SUV that they now know was driven by Gregory McGee, 62. 

“I saw Greg as he topped that hill. He already had both tires on the passenger side in the ditch, throwing gravel. I figured he was going to yank it, so I gunned it to get past him,” said Coatney, who was accompanied by her boyfriend, Brian Dailing. In her rear-view mirror, she saw the SUV lurch back onto the pavement and continue into the northbound lane. “Then I saw it shoot up on one side, so I knew he’d hit somebody,” Coatney said.

By the time Coatney could safely turn around and return to the scene, Trisha Hathcock, who had been following Randolph, was on her phone, calling 911.

“They were both laying there, not moving. I thought they were both dead,” Hathcock told the Times. “Then I told 911, ‘OK, he’s moving. But he’s trapped.’” 

Coatney ran to McGee’s car first and saw that he was breathing. Then she ran to Randolph, who was partially ejected from his car, which was tilted up precariously on its side, with Randolph trapped underneath. “He kept saying, ‘I’m choking. I can’t breathe. Help me.’ He was pushing on the car,” Coatney said. “I told him, ‘Turn your head and spit. Turn your head and spit.’”

Her heart stopped when she looked in the backseat of Randolph’s car and saw a child safety seat. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, there’s a kid.’ I dropped to my knees, trying to see anything, a little arm or leg.  I started screaming, ‘Is there anybody with you? Is there anyone else? Is anyone with you?’ and he finally cleared his throat and focused a second and said, ‘No, I’m alone,’” Coatney said. “And he kept saying, ‘Help me.’ I told him, ‘Honey, lay still. Keep spitting. We’ve got help on the way.’”

To make sure, Coatney called 911 again. Just as she called, McGee’s SUV burst into flames.

 

‘The car’s on fire’

Pontiac / Price Place VFD chief Khristie Jacquin was driving home to Pontiac from Gainesville when she got the page reporting the accident. She arrived on scene a few minutes after the crash, the first emergency responder to arrive.

Ozark County Sheriff’s Deputies Justin Urich and Cpl. Curt Dobbs were in Gainesville when they heard the radio call about two victims trapped in wreckage and went racing to the crash site. As they were talking with dispatch on the radio, they could overhear Jacquin also calling in on her radio. “You could hear the panic in her voice. She was saying, ‘Help! The car’s on fire. I need help now,’” Urich said. “That’s something you never want to hear on the radio.”

“Everybody was working on getting the fire out,” Jacquin said. “I checked both men, and both were speaking to me.” Although both victims had obviously suffered traumatic injuries, McGee’s vehicle was on fire, so that made him the immediate priority. 

Two semi-truck drivers who arrived on scene had fire extinguishers. “But I emptied both of them, and the fire still wasn’t out,” Jacquin said. “Then the one driver came with jugs of water, and someone had a cooler of ice that we dumped on it.”

As their frantic efforts intensified, Jacquin knew they were going to have to break the windshield to get McGee out. “I asked the women who were there to find me something to put over his face to protect it from the glass, and one of them just immediately took off her shirt and handed it to me,” Jacquin said. “She stood there working in her bra.”

Hathcock said one of the bystanders was a man who told them later he’d just gotten back in town for the holiday. “He told the woman, ‘There’s a suitcase in the backseat of my car. Go open it and pick you out a shirt,’ and she did,” Hathcock said.

Urich and Dobbs arrived with another fire extinguisher. “The flames were all in front, not quite to the windshield. I hit it with the fire extinguisher,” Urich said. “Dobbs managed to pull the windshield out. I don’t know how he did it. Then he grabbed a huge chunk of the dash and pulled it out through the windshield. It was amazing.” 

Urich emptied his fire extinguisher and then ran back to his vehicle and “grabbed every bottle of water and soda I could grab,” he said. He also carried a case of bottled water back to the blaze. 

“For a while we were all standing there uncapping the water bottles and pouring it on the fire,” said Hathcock, who is the daughter of former PPPVFD chief Art Streigle, who died in March. She had also been a Gainesville High School classmate of Randolph’s sister, and her husband, Anthony, had been in Randolph’s class. 

Afraid the vehicle was about to explode, Dobbs frantically tried to get a grip on McGee to pull him out of the burning vehicle. “He was way up under the dash. I was yanking on stuff to get it out of the way. Finally I could see his feet, and I reached in and unhooked them, and another guy came in through the hatch and Justin reached in, and we were able to get him out.”

“Another couple of minutes, and it would have been a very different scenario,” Urich said.

 

‘The most qualified people you could have’

McGee was taken to Baxter Regional Medical Center in Mountain Home, Arkansas, by Ozark County Ambulance as the focus moved from the vehicle fire to Randolph, still penned under his car. As other responders strained to keep the car from moving, Coatney and Hathcock had stayed at Randolph’s side, talking with him and reassuring him.  

Other first responders from the Pontiac / Price Place, Gainesville and Oakland (Arkansas) volunteer fire departments quickly arrived, including nurse practitioner Lisa Hoffman with Gainesville VFD and paramedic Michelle Lewis with PPPVFD. 

Jacquin directed the two women to Randolph. “He had to be stabilized before we could lift the car off of him,” Jacquin said. “It turned out that we had the most qualified people you could have right there to help the man trapped with the car on top of him.”

Air Evac also arrived, and while other responders pushed wood “cribbing” blocks under Randolphs’ vehicle and readied the hydraulic vehicle extrication equipment – the “jaws of life” – the emergency team intubated Randolph while he was still trapped in the wreckage.

After he was pulled out and stabilized, Randolph was flown to Cox South Hospital in Springfield. 

 

A dangerous stretch of road

The June 30 accident was the third vehicle crash in about four months that occurred at the same site on Highway 5 south near its intersection with W Highway. 

Michael Clark, 59, of Flippin, Arkansas, died Feb. 17 of injuries sustained when his northbound truck crashed head-on into a southbound vehicle driven by Patricia Hobbs, 68, of Jordan, Arkansas, as Hobbs’ vehicle crossed the center line. Coatney was one of the first drivers to arrive at that scene also.

In between the February fatality and last week’s injury crash was another accident in which a woman driving northbound slid off the road and halfway into the ditch before her car came to a stop. No injuries occurred in that incident, and the vehicle was drivable afterward. Emergency personnel, including PPPVFD, responded for traffic control.

And before that, in January 2019, two semis and four cars slid off the curves there within a few minutes of each other when icy conditions made that section of highway especially treacherous. 

The deputies and fire chief agree that there’s just something about the hill and curves on that section of highway that makes them dangerous. For one thing, with J Highway closed while a bridge is being rebuilt, Highway 5 carries more traffic between Gainesville and Mountain Home, Arkansas. Also, it’s “tourist time for this area,” Jacquin added. “There is a pattern of accidents at this same location, and people need to slow down around these curves and pay attention to other drivers as well,” she said.  

McGee has been charged with driving while intoxicated and careless and imprudent driving in connection with the crash, according to the online MSHP report, which said the crash occurred as Randolph was traveling northbound and McGee, traveling southbound, “crossed the centerline and entered Randolph’s lane.” Randolph hit McGee’s vehicle in the side, the report says. 

Neither Randolph nor McGee was wearing a seatbelt, according to the report, which was filed by MSHP Sgt. L. S. Elliott. 

The Times was unable to confirm McGee’s current condition, but it’s believed he was still hospitalized at BRMC when this story was written on Monday. 

 

‘They truly gave their all’

Randolph’s mother, Brenda Miller, said Sunday that her son has head and facial fractures, including a broken jaw, but he doesn’t appear to have any brain damage, she said. He has a broken femur, and one knee was rebuilt “with plates and screws” during a seven-hour surgery, she said. “They’re also contemplating surgery on the other knee. And he has broken ribs on both sides and his pelvis and hips are broken,” she said. 

Randolph faces several more extensive surgeries, she said, but “in the long run, they say he’ll be fine.”  

Miller was babysitting Randolph’s two younger children, Tristan, 8, and Trinity, 4, and she knew her son was looking forward to attending Tristan’s ball game in Gainesville that Tuesday night. “When it got to be four o’clock and he wasn’t there, I just had that motherly gut feeling that something was wrong. And then, 10 minutes later, Seth called with the news,” she said. Ozark County Sheriff’s Deputy Seth Miller is Paula Coatney’s son; Paula called him from the scene and asked him to contact Miller and her husband, Dave.  

Brenda Miller expressed thanks to all who helped both victims of the crash and also to the many friends who have showered her family with prayers, love and kindness.  A nurse told her daughter, Stephanie Flageolle, “if Paula and Trisha hadn’t talked to Josh and kept him alert as long as they did, he could have had brain damage,” said Brenda, a cancer survivor. “By the grace of God, he’s alive. People have said, ‘We don’t know how he got out of that alive.’ But I know.” 

Many others who are familiar with the crash details also gave God the ultimate credit for the two men’s survival – in large part for the people He sent to help. 

“It was a godsend,” Dobbs agreed. “We had the right people there at the right time.”

And those “right people” included the drivers who were following the impacted vehicles and immediately rushed to help. 

“Those bystanders,” said Jacquin, “they truly gave their all.”

When she could step back and take a breath, Paula Coatney used her phone to take pictures of the other rescuers at work. “Everybody who had a part of it worked together,” she said. “Some of us didn’t know each other’s names. We didn’t care what color or what their views on the world are. I just wanted to show Josh later that none of that mattered. There’s two men trapped in their cars, and perfect strangers came together – people who didn’t know you – but wanted to help.”   

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