When Lora Esslinger Meirowsky’s cell phone rang shortly before sunup on the morning of Oct. 20, 2008, she wasn’t surprised.
Meirowsky, who grew up in Madison, already was on the Kansas Turnpike at 6 a.m., driving from El Dorado to a conference in Topeka. The phone’s shrill interruption brought a feeling of happy anticipation.
She’d been waiting to hear from her daughter, Samantha, who was due to give birth at any time. Meirowsky assumed this was the call she’d waited for.
But the voice at the other end of the connection was a hospital chaplain, in Wichita, and he was calling about her husband, Tim, who had been flown to Wesley Medical Center from the scene of a head-on crash about 10 miles north of Emporia.
Former Emporian Tim Meirowsky had been on the turnpike, too, driving to work. Also on the turnpike that night was a 22-year-old Atchison man who’d apparently stopped for a time along a shoulder of the road, then made a U-turn on the highway and headed in the opposite direction toward an inevitable meeting with Meirowsky.
Meirowsky had left El Dorado more than an hour before and had planned to stop at the south Topeka interchange, as he always did, to pick up four workers from his crew who would ride along to the job site near Lawrence. Their employer, F&H Insulation of Kechi, had contracted to work on the Westar energy plant there.
The turnpike was almost deserted as Meirowski headed north around 4:20 a.m. The road took a little rise and a bit of a curve into the darkness when Meirowski noticed a large truck approaching in the southbound lanes.
“This truck came around the corner and he’s flashing his lights. ... I thought, ‘What the heck is his problem?’” Meirowsky said. “I turned back in time to go ‘Huh!’”
Immediately in front of him, racing southbound in the northbound lane, was another vehicle, far too close to avoid a collision. The trucker flashing his lights had been trying to warn Meirowsky of the imminent danger.
Meirowsky had enough time to jerk the wheel about an inch, he said.
“My right foot just instinctively went to the brake, and that’s what broke my leg,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “That’s all I can remember.”
The oncoming 1993 Oldsmobile Cutlass collided head-on with Meirowsky’s 1999 Chevrolet Suburban 4x4.
“He hit me low because the Suburban sat up so much higher, and I just drove clear back through the back seat on his car, I guess,” Meirowsky said. “From what I was told, it spun me. It stopped him right dead in the road.”
Meirowsky heard the trucker hit his air brakes and back up to the scene to help. The trucker walked past the car, and on down to the Suburban.
“I heard him yell, and I said, ‘I’m over here,’” Meirowsky said. “The first thing I asked him was, ‘This truck isn’t on fire, is it?’ I knew I wasn’t getting out.”
The impact had pushed up the Suburban’s cab, bending the steering wheel and causing the airbag to burst upward; the bag deployed to within about an inch of his face. When he looked down, he saw that the floor and side of the driver’s compartment had been shoved in against his left leg.
“It was all rolled up on my leg,” he said. “That’s when I noticed my right foot was crossways on the brake pedal — and I knew that wasn’t right.”
Meirowsky’s collar bone had been broken by the safety restraint he wore.
The other driver had not been as fortunate. The trucker who stopped told Meirowsky that the young man was dead.
The autopsy
It was almost three months before details were revealed that provided a possible reason for the 22-year-old Atchison man’s driving the wrong way on an enclosed highway in the dead of night.
In an Incident Narrative Report dated Jan. 18, 2009, a KHP trooper added the following supplemental report to the accident case file:
“On 1-5-09, the Autopsy Report for (the deceased) was finalized by Dr. Erik K. Mitchell. The summary of the report by Dr. Mitchell indicated that (the deceased) expired as the consequence of blunt traumatic injuries but was highly intoxicated with difluoroethane, a fluorinated hydrocarbon used as propellant in canisters of various liquids.
“At the accident scene, a can of (aerosol dust remover) compressed gas cleaner 1-1 Difluoroethane and a large plastic bag were collected from the passenger seat of the (deceased’s) vehicle.”
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