2 in Car Crushed by Cement Truck Live to Tell About It

Two Navy firefighters were nearly crushed Monday afternoon when a loaded cement mixer careened down a highway off-ramp and rolled over onto their car.

The 65,000-pound truck flattened the right rear side of the car, and had front-seat passenger William Skalla sandwiched between the car roof and seat.

“When you see a cement mixer coming at you head-on, with no brakes . . . “ Skalla said from his hospital bed Monday night. “It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. I thought I was dead.”

Skalla, 25, said he had just gotten through with root-canal work at the dentist and was going to eat lunch at a nearby restaurant with fellow Navy firefighter Elbert Lawson Polling. Polling, 30, was driving.

The men were in the intersection of Spring Street near the California 94 off-ramp as the cement mixer was unable to brake, careened down the Spring Street ramp, sideswiped another car and, top-heavy, flipped over onto Pollings’ car as it tried to negotiate the turn, California Highway Patrol Sgt. Carl Bailey said.

To Skalla, all that happened in a fraction of a second. He remembers dust, glass and dirt flying everywhere while his buddy climbed from the driver’s window. He had stayed just a couple of seconds ahead of the cement mixer’s gigantic drum by sliding toward the steering wheel. Skalla added that he had disobeyed Navy orders, leaving his seat belt off for the short distance to the restaurant--a belt he says would have trapped him under the truck.

Skalla said he was in tremendous pain, lying smashed into the seat divider and the roof, and that a man was telling him not to move. But Skalla started to scramble out when he heard someone saying there was fuel leaking out. Polling pulled him from the driver’s side window, and as he drifted into a shadow world, Skalla said, a woman helped him stay conscious until paramedics arrived. He escaped with a broken collar bone, bruised ribs--and his life.

Polling and the cement truck driver, Warren Lee Seevers, 37, of La Mesa, were not injured, Sgt. Bailey said.

From his bed at Sharp Memorial Hospital, Skalla said, “I felt like I got stomped on like a bug.”