My Floormate Nearly Killed Me

Freshmen year is the critical time when you first leave the nest of home, and you truly are free to make your own decisions – for the better or worse. It’s a time for self exploration and personal growth. The key thing is to learn from mistakes – and being able to live to tell the tale. In today’s MyDorm blog, SDSU student Anonymous recounts how his floormate nearly killed him in a car crash his second week of Freshmen year. The floormate and driver of the car in the story makes a second appearance in our blogs. Take it away, Anonymous.“To set the stage, think back to second week of college, Freshmen year. I was living in the dorms, Maya hall to be exact, and was enjoying some festivities with friends. Second week of college still means you don’t yet know everyone on your dorm floor, but there’s an eagerness to trust and befriend all those around you. It was late at night, probably around 11:30 p.m., when a group of five of us decided we really wanted to get In N Out ~10 minutes down the road.

As fate would have it, the individual who volunteered to drive had a loud and powerful V8 Mustang GT. For those not familiar, the GT is a four seater car. Having never been in a real car accident, and considering the short drive, I volunteered myself to sit in the middle section without a real seat. What’s the chances that this is the one time something happens, right? As we get into the car and start driving out of the parking structure, there’s a crowd of students outside. Eagerly, the driver revs the 350+ horses and gets the back tires spinning to the encouraging cheers of the bystanders.

To begin the journey, we needed to go from the campus onto the 8 freeway. To give a better image of where we drove, the image below depicts the on-ramp that we needed to take.

As we headed down the street towards the on-ramp, I remember my co-passenger jokingly saying “let’s have fun, but just don’t kill us”. Now for those unaware of the 8 West Onramp from SDSU, it’s pretty much a full 270 degree turn on a downhill slope. After the turn, it leads to a straight away that is raised about 5 feet from the freeway to the left. The driver entered this curve, which is posted at around 25, going 45 miles per hour. The entire way down, the driver has his foot on the accelerator. I later learned that we hit 60 mph halfway down and were approaching 80 at the bottom. As the driver was flying down, I remember clearly thinking to myself that he must be some pro street racer or drifter in order to manage these speeds. Wrong.

As we exited the bottom of the curve, the car fish tailed and the front was facing the hill and bushes to the right. As impact was imminent and tires were screeching against the pavement looking for grip, the driver counter steered hard. This is the point at which I either lost consciousness, or simply could not remember due to the speed at which the events happened. The music we were blasting (some dubstep remix of N*ggas in Paris) seemed to go silent. The front of the car hit the median curb to the left, and we were airborne. The car made a full 180 degree spin in the air, and bounced into the freeway coming to a stop 2 lanes into the highway, facing oncoming traffic. At the same time, two oncoming cars flew past us at 70 in the two adjacent lanes to the right. Had they decided to be in our lane that night, I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. I yell at the driver to pull the car facing the right way, and we pull off to the side. To my disbelief, the group consensus was to continue to proceed to In N Out. As we arrived and put in our orders, my hunger was gone. While they ate, I stared out the In N Out window and remembered seeing a cross lit on the hillside. Maybe a sign? Or maybe coincidence.I remember the surreal feeling the next day at work. Students laughing and shouting across the campus, the shine shining on another nice day at state. And if I had passed that previous night, tomorrow would still have come. You gain a lot of motivation when you apply a ‘nothing to lose’ philosophy as you know you’re working on borrowed time.

Now during the loss of control of the car, the guy next to me in the rear of the car had held onto the seat-belt of the girl in front of him. Fast forward five years, and they are now married. I ended up becoming future roommates and good friends with the car driver. Call it fate, call it destiny, I call it a close call crash freshmen year.” – Anonymous