When Jan-Michael Archer thought he would save $300 on a mechanic by fixing his car himself, he never expected he would pay even more than that in the end.
On April 7, 2012, a Saturday afternoon turned life threatening, when the junior marine biology major was underneath his Honda Del Sol trying to repair it when suddenly the jack slipped from under it. The car came down on him, pinning him underneath its weight.
“The first thing vividly I remember is seeing the engine fall,” Archer said. “I was working with the engine over my chest, so it might have been the radiator that fell on me. But I saw it and somehow managed to turn my head fast and far enough so that it didn’t catch me in the eye. But it came straight down on my head, so my cheek was pressed right against the side of it, crushing my face.”
It took Archer a few seconds to realize he was trapped, after trying to lift the car off of him himself. Since the engine was pinning his chest down, he couldn’t fully inflate his lungs, making it hard for him to breathe.
“When it first hit me I just tried to push it, and when that didn’t work that’s when I thought I was going to die. The scariest moment was those first moments before anyone found me. And I was just screaming for a few minutes and nobody was coming, and I just thought ‘What if nobody comes?’”
Luckily, Archer only spent a few minutes alone before someone heard him screaming for help. Senior management information systems major Chris Warnock was the first one to find Archer trapped underneath his car.
“I heard someone yelling for help,” Warnock said. “At first I thought it was a joke. I saw his car was kind of tilted funny and all this stuff around it and I thought maybe there was a crash or something. And all I saw was this car without a wheel and it’s tilted and there’s this arm sticking out from underneath it.”
Warnock gathered a few more people and called campus security, who responded to the scene in a matter of minutes. He called 911 to get an ambulance there about 10 minutes later.
But until then, there were mixed feelings of what to do. Archer was desperately trying to get people to help him lift the car up.
“I didn’t hold it against them, I was just scared, but I was really confused and really frustrated because you see in movies, that if enough people push against a car in a riot it flips over,” Archer said.
But 911 told them to do otherwise.
“911 told us not to, because he could have internal bleeding and we would kill him,” Warnock said. “[Jan] was freaking out. He was trying to move the car off of himself with his one arm. And he was yelling for us to get the car off of him. And we couldn’t tell him why, because we didn’t want him to go into shock, so we were trying to just calm him down.”
It’s like if somebody were impaled with a sharp object; it’s not always the best idea to remove that object without medical staff around, since he or she could bleed out.
After the ambulance arrived, Archer began to calm down a little. The car had still been coming down; it was Archer’s body that was stopping it from hitting the ground. The paramedics got him onto a stretcher and he was brought to the trauma center at Tampa General Hospital. Junior marine biology major and longtime friend, Amelia Winston, served as Archer’s emergency contact.
“He looked terrible, he had a cut on his face by his eyebrow and there was blood all over the bed but they had cleaned the blood off his face when we walked in [the hospital],” Winston said. “Initially I was really scared because I didn’t have many details and the stories that I was hearing were very inconsistent and nobody really knew what had happened so I kind of went into emergency mode and just stayed quiet until I was able to see him. But when I saw him I was relieved because he was talking perfectly fine.”
Archer suffered a head wound that was closed up with stitches, and a painful wound to his hip, where part of the engine had impaled him. There were miraculously no broken bones or a concussion.
Winston got in contact with Archer’s older sister, Nirvana Archer, in Atlanta.
“I didn’t know it was that serious, I didn’t know what to think. I just knew that he was at the hospital so he would be OK,” Nirvana said.
Archer’s father ended up driving down the following morning to check on him, assuring himself that he was all right.
Archer doesn’t know how he didn’t walk away with more injuries. One of the wheels was off the car, so he wasn’t supporting the full weight, but a good portion.
“I wish I knew everyone’s name; I owe them all my life for whatever part they played for everyone that was there. I’ve got to track that security guard down and tell her thanks. I wish I could offer a reward or something,” he laughs.
Campus security doesn’t have any rules against working on a car while on campus, but they “would not recommend working under a vehicle without properly knowing the vehicle is securely lifted. We would also not recommend working on or under a car on an uneven or slanted surface such as those in the garage,” said Linda Devine, Vice President for Operations and Planning.
Archer was on the second floor of Thomas Parking Garage, by the area where the golf carts are parked.
The main lesson he came out with is to not do any type of work that you are not comfortable with, alone. “If you can’t be with somebody, tell them where you are, and when to expect a call from you and if they don’t hear from you, they know what to do,” he said.
He also learned, “Don’t be cheap. The amount of time and extra money spent on top of it, from trying to cut corners and stuff, is not worth it. Especially when you almost kill yourself.”
Caroline Metell can be reached at cmetell@spartans.ut.edu.
A very sad situation for the student but a lesson to be learned for people who want to fix things on their own like a car. There is no one to blame in a situation like this, the only thing that can be done is to use this as an example for other people on what not to do.