‘You saved her life’

Richard Smith grabbed the hand of the man who saved his mother’s life and shook it with a purpose. With a firm grasp, Smith pumped Huntington Beach Police Officer Brian Knorr’s hand, seeming to try and convey much of his gratitude through the simple gesture.

Less than two weeks earlier, Knorr had pulled 83-year-old Eleanor Smith out of her 1999 Chrysler moments before it sank to the bottom of a drainage ditch on Slater Avenue, nearly taking her with it.

Knorr barely got in the front door of Smith’s Huntington Beach home Thursday when he was intercepted by her thankful son.

“I am positive that you saved her life,” Richard Smith said to Knorr.

At 7:30 a.m., Sept. 3, Richard Smith was asleep in bed at the back of the house where he lives with his mother on Misty Lane. Slightly deaf in both ears, he did not hear a thing.

“I was still in my pajamas at 7:30 a.m. I thought she’d left by [then],” Smith said. “I went outside to close the garage door and the neighbor was speaking to me frantically and I couldn’t understand what she was saying to me.”

Richard Smith knew something was wrong when he saw all of the police vehicles on the street in front of his house and across Slater Avenue.

“I had no idea what could have possibly happened,” Richard Smith said.

He got dressed, ran across the street and saw his mother lying on a stretcher.

“I actually thought she was dead,” he said. “I thought I had lost my mother.”

After losing his father in March to cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, the idea of his mother having died was too much.

The meeting in Smith’s living room was the first chance Richard Smith had to thank Knorr for his courage. It was also the first time Eleanor Smith and Knorr had seen each other since Smith was whisked off in an ambulance to Huntington Beach Hospital 11 days earlier.

Knorr sat with Eleanor in her living room discussing ambulance fees, towing bills and an investigation promised by Chrysler — that had still not begun — on her totaled vehicle.

On Sept. 14, the ditch held only a foot or two of water, and looked steeper and less likely to completely consume a car with water. Only a residual water-line stain about six feet up the walls of the ditch indicated how deep was the water that swallowed Eleanor Smith’s car.

She gasped when she saw the front page photograph of her rescue from the flooding car in the Sept. 14 Independent.

“I’ve never been so scared in my whole life,” Eleanor Smith said. “The car just went by itself — and so fast.”

Most of her frustration has been aimed at Chrysler and what she saw as a manufacturing error.

That morning, as Smith pulled the car out of her garage with her foot off the gas, the engine raced to an uncontrollable speed, she said. Smith slammed both her feet onto the brake, which did not respond.

The car rammed into the curb on the other side of Misty Lane and then across Slater Avenue and into the ditch, where Knorr found her.

Smith said she has a perfect driving record, but fears people may not believe her because of accidents involving the elderly — such as the then-86-year-old motorist being tried for manslaughter in the deaths of 10 people at Santa Monica Farmer’s Market in July 2003.

“I hope that age doesn’t go against me,” Smith said “I have a very good driving record. They’ve been getting after the old people.”

She has also dealt with the frustration of being dependent on others for transportation, being without a working vehicle.

“It’s frustrating because I can’t go to church, I can’t go to the market,” she said. “My son has to drive me everywhere.”

Thankful that she didn’t cause injury to others as her car raced across Slater Avenue that morning, Smith still worries about what tomorrow holds for her.

“I might be OK today,” she said. “But who knows about later?”