Timber Dick’s wife is counting her blessings and praying for one more stroke of good fortune while her husband clings to life in a burn ward.
Dick, 52, was burned over 60 percent of his body when a front wheel on his Dodge Caravan locked and the vehicle slid off Interstate 70. It hit a guard rail, burst into flames and tumbled 240 feet down a slope Saturday.
“Timber climbed out from the flames and dragged himself, crawling and flaming from that vehicle … It would have been so much easier to just die,” said Annette Lantos Tillemann-Dick, at a press conference today to thank the good Samaritans who put out the flames devouring his body.
Dick is alive, she says, because Andrew Rosenberg had a fire extinguisher in his vehicle when he and Scott Boylan stopped to help Dick.
Boylan, Newsradio 850 KOA traffic reporter, and Rosenberg were returning from a day of taking pictures and four-wheeling in the mountains when they saw Dick’s minivan careen down the hill and come to rest on the frontage road.
Dick was ablaze, and flames were licking at the dry grass around him, Rosenberg said.
“He was engulfed when I got up to him. I am convinced that we couldn’t have put it out with jackets,” Rosenberg said.
He was able to block out the shock of the calamity as he helped put out the flames, Boylan added.
“You are not thinking about the fire and the smell and the explosions and everything that is going on — you just don’t pay any heed of that.”
Others also stopped and helped to redirect and put out the grass fires that threatened to add smoke inhalation to the damage that Dick suffered.
Dick is an inventor whose company, Tendix Development, won a transportation-design award earlier this year in contest sponsored by a NASA publication. He unsuccessfully ran for Denver City Council in 2003. His mother was Colorado’s first female lieutenant governor, Nancy Dick, who served from 1979 to 1986.
Dick has already lived through the initial 72 hours that is so crucial to a burn victim’s chances of survival, said Gordon Lindberg, director of the University of Colorado Hospital’s burn unit.
He is in a medically induced coma to spare him the severe pain of his burns and the repeated surgeries that will be required to heal him. He will remain in that state for more than a month, and there is no guarantee that he won’t contract an infection that could kill him before he wakes.
His wife, who sobbed often as she spoke, is waiting and praying.
“Every time I feel discouraged I think of these miracles and gifts we have had already. I am really focusing on what incredible things have happened.”
A fund has been set up to help the family cover medical expenses.
Contributions can be made to the “Timber Dick Catastrophe Fund” through any Wells Fargo Bank.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
