By Jorge Valencia
The Roanoke Times
FRANKLN COUNTY, Va. — Volunteer firefighters Brian Garland and Ronnie Mitchell had just left one of the goriest wrecks they had ever seen. A compact car and an SUV had crashed into each other on Booker T. Washington Highway in Franklin County.
The firefighters used heavy tools to pry both vehicles open and pull a teenage girl out of one and a couple in their 50s and 60s out of the other. Once the people were taken away on stretchers, Garland and Mitchell drove toward home to shower the blood off their hands and arms.
Six miles away, along the winding, two-lane Grassy Hill Road, they noticed bark torn off a tree. That was strange, Garland later recalled, so they pulled over. They saw it at the bottom of a 70-foot drop from the side of the road: the dark underside of a 1992 Chevrolet Blazer.
It was dangling upside down, and in it there was an unconscious man. “When Ronnie went over to the embankment and he starts screaming someone’s inside, you start thinking ‘We need to get him out as soon as possible,’ ” Garland recalled Thursday afternoon.
The man was Robert Lee Boatright Jr., a 54-year-old from Boones Mill. His wife of 16 years, Kathy, died in January. On June 1, he was convicted of driving while intoxicated, with a Franklin County General District Court judge suspending his license for a year.
About 5 p.m. Saturday, Garland and Mitchell found him in his flattened car. The sky was glowing electric gray, and Garland, an off-duty Rocky Mount police officer, called 911 operators. They were desperate for more help: the car’s doors were jammed shut.
Within minutes it was raining and thundering and two others from the Rocky Mount Volunteer Fire Department, Jody Whitt and Matt King, were hammering a tool known as a Halligan bar beside the Blazer’s frame to force the door open. Garland couldn’t remember whether Boatright was wearing a seat belt, but he remembered that he had a pulse.
Firefighters pulled Boatright up the hill in a rescue basket and requested a helicopter to pick him up, but it couldn’t fly because of the storm. Boatright was taken in an ambulance to Carilion Franklin Memorial Hospital in Rocky Mount and later to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. There was no certainty to how long his car was perched below the road.
It could have been as many as 18 hours, his brother-in-law later said. “I think me and Ronnie did exactly what anybody else would have done if they found a car upside down off the road,” said Garland, 25. “Anybody would have done that.” Not everyone could be saved.
A condition on the teenage driver from Booker T. Washington Highway could not be obtained because she is under age. In the other car were Calvin Lee Holdren, 61, and Renee Holdren, 55.
According to a hospital spokesman, Calvin Holdren was still in the hospital Thursday night, and Renee Holdren had been released. Boatright died in the hospital on Tuesday, Rocky Mount Police Sgt. Andy Pendleton said. But on Thursday night, his brother-in-law, Danny Flint of Roanoke, thanked the firefighters who found Boatright’s car.
They “should be commended for being able to observe the fact that ‘Hey, something’s happened here,’ ” Flint said. “The policeman who saw the bark torn off that tree is a hero as far as I’m concerned.”
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