Lyman Briggs freshman Humphrey Petersen-Jones grips the hand of his girlfriend, Emily Mata, Tuesday in his room at the University of Michigan Hospital, in Ann Arbor.
There was nothing left to do but grip the steering wheel and carefully drive down the road.
With her two youngest children in the backseat, Bryden Stanley, an assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine, drove toward the University of Michigan Hospital, in Ann Arbor. Progress was slowed by heavy traffic, a result of US-23 being backed up because of an accident — her son’s accident.
An accident that had already claimed the lives of the three others traveling in the car with her son, an MSU freshman.
And minutes after the officer knocked on her door, after she was told to come to the hospital as soon as she could, the same accident that had hurt her son, Humphrey Petersen-Jones, was holding her back.
“We knew it was a serious accident,” she said. “We didn’t know if he was alive or dead.”
Not knowing was the worst part for her.
Now, more than two weeks after the accident, Petersen-Jones is still in the hospital and expected to make a full recovery. He can’t remember the accident or the day it happened, but he remembers the friends he lost.
It is still unknown how the crash, which took place Oct. 10 as the group of students headed back from MSU’s game against U-M, occurred. A representative from the Green Oak Township police said the investigation is ongoing.
Okemos, Mich., residents 18-year-old Matthew Kolstoe and 19-year-old Heather Comstock and 18-year-old Williamston, Mich., resident Sarina Seger died in the crash.
“They were just magnificent, wonderfully intelligent, wonderfully kind people,” Petersen-Jones said of his friends. “It’s tragedy that this happened. … So much potential was lost.”
After arriving at the hospital, Stanley saw her son was in a stable condition. But it still would be several days until she knew Petersen-Jones, hooked to tubes to help him breathe and often drowsy from various medications, was alright.
“Mom,” Petersen-Jones asked at the time. “What’s in my nose?”
It’s been several weeks since the accident that twisted Petersen-Jones’ leg, broke his back, fractured his skull twice and almost cost him his left arm. But Petersen-Jones considers himself lucky.
“It gives me hope that there is some ultimate reason that I didn’t end up a casualty,” Petersen-Jones said Tuesday. “Maybe I’m here to do something good in the end. It’s definitely something that I try to cling on to.”
That’s part of his motivation to regain what he has lost. On Tuesday he sat up in his hospital bed, dressed in a shirt, not a gown. He wriggles his toes, he makes jokes. He offers some of the bags and boxes of food people have bought him.
He can walk with the help of a cane. On Tuesday, for the first time, he climbed the stairs.
“I’m relieved,” said Emily Mata, Petersen-Jones’ girlfriend and a freshman at Lansing Community College.
Petersen-Jones doesn’t remember the Sunday of the accident at all. He only remembers the night before, eating burgers and cheering MSU to victory with his high school friends.
“It’s kind of frustrating because it’s not like it happened,” he said. “I just woke up and three of my friends are dead and I’m all beat up.”
The Tuesday after the crash, Petersen-Jones, although medicated at the time, told Stanley he still felt his friend’s presence with him.
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“I feel they’re watching me,” he said that day.
