A truck driver is thankful for the quick thinking of a fellow trucker after being pulled from his flaming rig in Mississippi last week.
Truck driver Uguster Jones says that he stayed up to watch his son’s award ceremony instead of getting some rest before his shift, and then went straight to work on Friday. He said he knew he was getting sleepy behind the wheel but before he knew it, his truck was veering off of Interstate 20 in Rankin County before crashing into a tree. Jones’ cab then caught fire, but Jones was trapped and exhausted.
“I heard the boom. I heard the glass and everything. Even though I had my eyes closed, you can still hear all the side effects,” Jones said. “The windshield was folded almost like a taco. It was probably a couple of inches from my face. I grabbed that with my right hand and pushed it off of me. That’s when I noticed the fire. The fire was blazing.”
“I kind of just sat back, just waited, you know, just sat back and waited on the fire because I used all my energy. I just said, ‘Lord this is it. This is my ticket,’” he continued to 16 ABC.
Just as Jones felt fully surrendered to his fate, he heard voices, and used the very last of his strength to call for help.
“I was like, ‘Help, help,’ and I know I was saying it weird, so with all my strength, the third time I said, ‘HELP,’ and just sat back and looked at the fire,” Jones said.
The voices belonged to truck driver and former firefighter Stephen Langley and his trainee, Dasia Doby. The two had been driving by when they saw the flames and stopped to help.
I reached down between the steering column and between his pants leg and said, ‘Man, this going to hurt.’ And I yanked as hard as I could and freed his leg up,” Langley said. Just as he was trying to pull Langley from the cab, two men who happened to be powerlifters pulled over and stopped to help as well.
“Had it been five minutes later, and we not have stopped, he would’ve been burned to death,” Langley said.
“I just want to thank them, you know, because I had (given) up. I didn’t just give up on my life. I gave up on my son, my family,” Jones said.
Thanks to the efforts of those Good Samaritans and fellow truckers, Jones made it out of the incident with just a broken femur. He will start physical therapy next week and is expected to start driving again in five months.
“I’m not a hero, I’m just a person that would do that for anybody else, and I look at it as I would want someone to do that for me if I was in that situation,” Langley said.
“I think about it daily, like, me in this profession. I want to make it home to my children. So, me seeing him, I would help without a question,” Doby said.