We left between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m. It was getting dark. As we got closer to Nephi, it started to rain. While traveling through Nephi Canyon, around 8:30 p.m., there was a wall of brown fur in front of us all of a sudden. We hit a herd of elk and killed two of them. Our truck died. We turned on the emergency flashers. We still had the headlights on. We climbed out of the truck to make sure that we could safely move the truck off of the road. The driver's door was open so that the dome light was on inside. Nellis and Mike went to check out the passenger side of the truck and I was on the driver's side of the truck looking at the driver's door. The only damage the elk caused was a dent in the front quarter panel on the driver's side and a dent in the driver's door.
I found Nellis stumbling towards me. All he remembers is seeing the other truck coming towards us and trying to push Mike out of the way. He said that he was "okay."
We did not see Mike and I started to panic, screaming for him. A couple, who were in a white car, came up to us and asked if we were okay and said that if it wasn't for us they would have hit the elk also. They had decided to stop and help and had parked their car on the other side of the road with their headlights and emergency flashers on. We told them we thought that we were okay, but that we were unable to find my brother, Mike. Nellis and I started screaming and yelling for Mike and they helped us search for him. As we were looking, a police officer or Utah Highway Patrol officer stopped to help.
The girl, who had stopped to help, yelled that she saw something moving at the bottom of a hill on the other side of the road. We ran down the hill and found Mike. He was leaning up against the hill with his hands on the ground and his legs bent. I think he was trying to go up the hill. He rolled over and laid down on the ground. He was all bloody. Since I had EMT training I tried to remember the assessment that I needed to perform. The girl ran to her car and grabbed coats and the officer grabbed a blanket. The officer tried to move Mike and I told him to leave him alone. He still insisted on moving him and Nellis yelled at him that I was an EMT and knew what I was doing.
Nellis started freaking out and going into shock, so the officer took him up to the road and made him direct traffic. When the ambulance arrived, I left Mike to them and went to find Nellis. When I found Nellis he looked at me and said that he was bleeding. He lifted up his shirt and his stomach was badly cut up and bleeding. I tried grabbing one of the EMTs to help, but he was too busy trying to get to Mike. I finally grabbed one of the other EMTs and she started checking on Nellis.
I talked to the girl who was in the car that stopped to help us and she said that we had saved them from hitting the elk. She also said that they tried waving at the other truck to get them to slow down and they never saw them use their brakes or try to stop or miss us.
They asked me which hospital to go to. I thought we were closer to Mount Pleasant, and Nellis and I knew some of the people who worked there, so I told them to take us to the Sanpete Valley Hospital in Mount Pleasant, Utah.
The EMTs told us that they think the couple who hit was were going about 75 miles per hour. They said that we should have been killed and were all very lucky to be alive. They could not figure out how we lived through the accident.
When the second ambulance arrived I had to ride in it with the two occupants of the vehicle that hit us. I would not look at them. I was too upset to. They were a college couple heading back to Snow College. They were not hurt, but their vehicle was totalled. They did not have insurance. The EMTs were asking questions and they said that they didn't even see us. They said in their witness statements that they "came up over a hill and there we were." (Where the accident happened is a straight stretch of road for several miles. The police report even states that the road is straight and level.)
