“I’ve had close scrapes and things like that, but never one that was on fire,” said Texas Highway Patrol officer Jerry Schmidt of Spur.
On the evening of Feb. 27, when Schmidt and his son, Cody, were in the Fort Worth area for their Texas Air National Guard training, Schmidt witnessed a multi-car collision on the I-820 Interstate on-ramp with one of the vehicles bursting into flames.
Schmidt and his son were about to sit down for a Saturday-night restaurant meal after a day of guard duty when the elder Schmidt returned to his vehicle for a moment—and heard the crash about 100 yards in the distance. He took off running the football-field distance without waiting to tell Cody.
“I heard the squealing, the car hitting the guardrail, then the fire and I ran up there,” Schmidt told the online publication Law Enforcement Today. “I always carry a flashlight in my left pocket. I pulled it out and flashed the cars so they wouldn’t run me over.”
Schmidt said to The Texas Spur, “There was a lot of merging, and my biggest worry was getting run over, or involved in a secondary collision.”
LET later shared the details from the incident report: According to a passenger in one vehicle, a Tesla clipped the Ford SUV her husband was driving, sending it spinning into the driver’s side of a Honda Accord ahead of it and coming to a stop facing the opposite direction of travel. The Tesla drove past the colliding vehicles and stopped. The Honda came to rest facing the guardrail, a couple of feet from the rear end of the SUV, which had burst into flames.
But Schmidt only knew at the time that drivers and passengers were in danger not only from highway traffic—which did eventually come to a halt, he said—and that he had to get people out of the burning vehicle.
In a scene straight out of Hollywood, he managed to pull the man and his wife out, and to safety across the guardrail. Then, with the help of another Good Samaritan who happened to be a medic, he turned his attention to the second vehicle. The pair used knives equipped with glass cutters to reach the unconscious driver through the windshield.
“The medic said, ‘you can’t move him, he could have a spinal injury’” and Schmidt replied, “Well, the threat of death is more imminent than further injury.” Smoke was getting into the compartment, Schmidt said, and it was getting really hot.
The men were able to lift the injured driver out. The entire rescue, from the time Schmidt saw the accident until emergency vehicles arrived, took about seven to 10 minutes, Schmidt said.
In the meantime, Cody, who’d returned to the nearby hotel with food, at last realized where his father must be—when he saw, from the second-story room window, the beam from the flashlight he knew his father always carried.
Back in the hotel after the incident was over, Cody told LET, his father was modest, as always, about his work.
Jerry Schmidt told The Texas Spur, “A lot of my military came into view because we did window breaking, how to extricate people. And incident management with the Highway Patrol, too.” Despite his 12 years of experience as a state trooper, though, Schmidt said it was only the second time he had ever come upon a scene like that. “I was just doing what we’re trained to do,” he said.
The Ford driver and his wife were able to walk after the crash; the other young man remains in the hospital, Schmidt said. Schmidt himself was not injured except for minor cuts from breaking window glass.
Schmidt’s sergeant has put in a request that he be given a Texas Department of Public Safety Lifesaving Award. But it’s not about the possible commendation, Schmidt said, it’s about being the right person in the right place at the right time.
“The Lord put me where he needed me” at that moment, Schmidt said.
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