That Sunday morning was as ordinary as can be in offseason Avon. Until, as witnesses put it, a truck fell from the sky. In the next few moments on May 13, the truck’s driver would die and the two occupants of an SUV it crushed would miraculously survive. Depending on who’s recounting the story, those two were either the luckiest or unluckiest people in Avon that day. Looking back, every second that ticked by and every turn taken as people went about their errands and weekend fun took on the utmost importance. Those seconds determined who would be out of harm’s way and who would be directly in it the instant that truck came crashing down in a shriek of ripping metal and a huge cloud of dust and debris that exploded into a 100-foot-high fireball. Among those driving to church or headed out for a family visit with a carload of kids and dogs, it would be the young couple on their way to play tennis who would be in the wrong place on Avon Road at just the wrong second. It was that young couple whose vehicle would be crushed and whose survival would amaze a community.
Lara Wahl, 25, and Bradley Zellefrow, 26, are still too shaken to talk about the experience, which began when they drove the mile from their apartment down the steep twist of Swift Gulch Road. They passed the yellow “trucks turning on roadway” sign, the Northside Coffee and Kitchen with its popular fried croissants, and the $4.15-per-gallon sign at the Shell station. They took the righthand curve on Avon Road under Interstate 70 at less than 30 mph.
Just then, about 10 a.m., it happened.
Wahl was driving. Zellefrow was next to her in the passenger seat of their 2-year-old silver Honda CR-V. Both had their seat belts buckled.
Above them — and unbeknownst to them — a Yellow Freight truck hauling two trailers filled with household goods was on its usual route from Chicago to California. And it was beginning to careen violently out of control.
The rig hit the guardrail along one side of the highway with a loud screech that drew the attention of everyone in the vicinity. The rear trailer swung around and snapped off, jerking the other trailer nearly backward and breaking the connection between the two. The rear trailer flipped over the guardrail and landed on the Honda, flattening Wahl’s side of the vehicle down to the bottom of the window.
According to witnesses, the rest of the tractor-trailer then appeared to travel backward at a high rate of speed before it, too, pitched over the edge, tearing out steel I-beams as it went. The torn metal ruptured the fuel tanks and shredded the underside of the rig before it, and the other trailer, thundered onto Avon Road.
The whole mangled mess was like a diesel bomb ready to blow as the fuel began to leak in frightening hisses and whooshes. The driver got out of the truck before it exploded but his charred body was found curled next to the wreckage. He has not been positively identified, although officials have notified probable next of kin.
Witnesses — in a car behind Wahl and Zellefrow, in the nearby 7-Eleven parking lot, and at the Christie Lodge — described it as being akin to watching a horrible movie.
“It was surreal,” said Rick MacCutcheon, who was driving to church with his daughter, Joanna, when the accident unfolded in front of them. “I know I will be carrying that moment with me my whole life.”
“I’ve lived along I-70 for 33 years, and I never imagined anything like this,” said Jerry Weiss, manager of the nearby Northside Coffee and Kitchen. “This truck fell literally from the sky.”
They all described it like an improbable crash scene in an apocalyptic movie.
The MacCutcheons ran toward the wreckage, as did Weiss, to see if they could help victims they were sure would be trapped in the car that was engulfed in the thick cloud of dust and debris. They saw two people walking out of that cloud. The MacCutcheons thought they must have been pedestrians near the accident. Weiss mistook them for rescuers.
That’s when Zellefrow said they had been in the car.
Rick MacCutcheon was in disbelief.
“I asked three times, ‘You were in that car?’ ” MacCutcheon recalled.
Then he asked, “How did you get out?”
“I don’t know,” Zellefrow answered as they laid a dazed Wahl on a grassy median.
She was bleeding from small cuts, but Zellefrow appeared unhurt. He knelt over her and soothed her as fire engulfed the car they had just been in.
The two told Avon Police Chief Robert Ticer the day after the accident that Zellefrow was able to open his door and pull Wahl from the wreckage less than a minute before the explosion enveloped their car and the truck in an inferno that could be seen more than a mile away.
“He was a real hero,” Ticer said.
Ticer served 20 years as an Arizona state patrolman before coming to Avon, so he knows accidents. He alternately called this one a miracle, a matter of good luck, and a case of bad timing — or good timing. He said it is one of the worst accidents — maybe the worst — ever to happen in Avon, which is bisected by 2 miles of I-70.
Investigators don’t yet know exactly what happened — the truck left no marks to indicate that the driver ever applied the brakes. His partner, who was in the sleeper and suffered minor injuries, has not been able to help with an answer.
Avon Detective Jeremy Holmstrom, who is still investigating details of the wreck, said that when he arrived on the scene, the fire was nearly out and he could barely recognize what had been a tractor-trailer rig or a mid-size SUV. He said aluminum had melted from the truck as if it were a beer can tossed in a bonfire.
“I expected to find at least four fatalities,” Holmstrom said.
The fact that there was a single fatality prompted Ticer to call it one of the best lessons he has ever seen to support one of his pet causes — seat belt usage.
“In a matter of seconds their car went from 25 to 30 mph and it came to an abrupt stop,” Ticer said. “If they hadn’t had their seat belts on they would have been thrown into the windshield and knocked out or worse. The seat belts kept them conscious and they were able to get out.”
As it was, Wahl and Zellefrow, both marked with serious bruises where the belts held them, were treated at Vail Valley Medical Center and later released. They have been holed up in their apartment on a ridge above the accident scene since Sunday. They have been so quiet that their next door neighbor thought they had left town.
“We’re not ready to talk. I’m sorry, but thank you for coming by,” Zellefrow said as he answered the door while Wahl lay on a couch wrapped in a crocheted comforter, looking pale and shaken.
Those who witnessed it can hardly talk about anything else.
Rick MacCutcheon said that moment when the young couple walked out of the debris cloud keeps replaying in his head. His daughter has a darker imprinted memory. She went on to church that day — barefoot and with blackened feet — to teach her planned class to preschoolers on spiritual gifts. But she keeps hearing the pleas for help she thinks came from the truck driver moments before he burned to death.
Joanna MacCutcheon said she was not thinking about danger when she dashed back into the wreckage under the interstate.
“In my heart and in my head I knew there was somebody still in there,” she said.
Weiss vividly remembers Joanna disappearing back into the cloud.
“I could hear the sizzle and pops like firecracker sounds. I was whistling and yelling at her — ‘stop, stop, stop.’ I knew no one could survive what was going to happen,” Weiss said, his eyes widening as he recalled his fears for her.
Joanna MacCutcheon heard Weiss screaming at her. She also heard a man in or near the truck screaming for help.
“For a split second, I thought ‘Should I try to save him?’ Then I had a flash of my family. I said, ‘I’m sorry’ to the man. I don’t know if he heard me,” she said. “Then I sprinted out.”
She said she doesn’t have just bad memories of the doomed truck driver. She has also come out of it with a positive message of living every day to the fullest “because you never know when you could be driving down Avon Road and be crushed by a semi.”
Avon, a quiet resort and working-class town of about 7,000, has its own neon reminders of that day — a phalanx of orange cones and webbing around the stretch of damaged and scorched roadway. When the road is patched and all signs of the crash scrubbed and overlayed and rebuilt, Avon residents are still likely to remember — the day a truck fell out of the sky and two of their own miraculously survived.
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com
