Students are no stranger to car accidents. Whether it be escaping the school parking lot, navigating the main roads during rush hour traffic or just making a timing mistake, Kingwood provides opportunities for disaster every day.

Harris County, which includes most of Kingwood, leads Texas in the number of traffic related collisions with 21% of all the state’s crashes coming from the area. When combined with the fact that teens only comprise 3.7% of the driving population but contribute to 9-14% of crashes nationwide, the statistics are not in the favor of teens living in Kingwood.

COMING FROM THE GAS STATION

Junior McKenna Grindle just wanted a slushie. She was in seventh grade at the time, and her dad was driving her home from lacrosse practice. They decided to stop at the gas station for a refuel and a treat. Afterward, Grindle’s dad started to pull out of the parking lot. 

“I just remember looking up at the sun because it was really bright, and then and like a blink of an eye I just remember getting pushed violently,” Grindle said. “I had a lot of pain in my neck and like something hit my face.” 

The “something” was the air bags that deployed after the collision. The pain in her neck was from the seatbelt that held her in place, but it left her with bruises on her neck she would hide under her collar for a month at school. 

But in the moment, Grindle didn’t know what was happening. She had never experienced a car wreck before, though she’d supposedly been in one when she was an infant. Grindle didn’t know it at the time, but the woman who had hit them collided with so much force their car was pushed off the road. 

“If she hit us a little harder we would have flipped,” Grindle said. 

Grindle told her dad to call her mom, and then they waited for the paramedics to arrive. Her terror increased when she saw what looked like smoke all around the car. 

“I was sitting there a good 10 minutes before they got there,” Grindle said. “And I was just like, oh my gosh, I need to get out of this car. I think it could be on fire.”

When the paramedics finally arrived, they assured her that it was not in fact smoke but dust from the air bags. They told her not to move while they tried to get her out of the vehicle safely, as the impact was on her side. She ended up getting out through the driver’s side. 

“I heard tons of voices and tons of people but I was still very out of it, and I just felt like I was in a fever dream,” Grindle said. 

Four years later, as Grindle goes through the process to get her license now, she’s gotten past the initial trauma of the event. 

“I thought it would scare me more, but [it didn’t].” Grindle said. 

DURING MY DRIVER’S TEST

Junior Amerie West thought she was doing pretty well on her driving test at the Humble Department of Public Safety. She had already passed her parallel parking exam with flying colors, even with her notoriously strict instructor who had failed Amerie’s sister a few years prior. 

“I was thinking that it was going good,” West said. “I thought I would pass.”

Her instructor directed her to turn out of the parking lot, and West did so without incident. The road looked completely clear. Her instructor told her to make a lane change, and West looked both ways, as was regulation. West changed and then looked up to see a car that had sped past in front of her as she was looking the other way to make the change. 

“And then as I was looking left to put on my turn signal, it cut me off without me knowing. And I turned to look back at the road and they had slammed on the brakes,” West said. “I slammed on my brakes immediately. My car made a horrible noise, [a] really big screeching noise.”

But that wasn’t enough to stop the collision, and West felt the impact of the front car’s bumper. She burst into tears as soon as she registered what happened. 

“It was really scary because it was my driving test and I wanted to do well on it,” West said. “And then the first time I get into a crash, all of a sudden the driving instructor is with me in the car.”

But West’s fears of the driving instructor were unfounded. She was calm and reassured her that everything would be fine. West was told to pull into the nearest parking lot after the other car. 

“At first she seemed very strict and I was kind of scared of her,” West said. “It was at the beginning of the test. But then as soon as the crash happened, she was very nice about it.” 

Though West was able to call her dad and get him to take care of the insurance details with the other car in the crash, she was crying too hard to finish the driving test and ended up having to reschedule. She didn’t drive again until the day of her second test, which she passed successfully. 

“I hadn’t driven in so long for my second test,” West said. “I was, like, nervous about that. But driving was muscle memory for me.” 

BIKING TO SCHOOL

In seventh grade, junior Kevin Strickler rode his bike to school every day. He’d never had an issue until one humid May morning. He reached the crosswalk at Woodland Hills Drive and Northpark and noticed that the timer had five seconds left. Strickler was confident he could make it. 

“I cross the first lane, which is the turning, I get past that, and then the second lane, the car comes out,” Strickler said. “I get hit by it, I go under the car and then it all was a big blur,”

His bike lodged between the back wheels of the car. Strickler came out just barely at the back from underneath the car. As soon as he got his bearing, he picked himself up and ran to the corner of the sidewalk across from the Exxon Gas Station. 

“And I kind of just laid there and I was like trying to control my breathing, trying to process what was going on,” Strickler said. “And my vision was fuzzy. I’m just like slowly breathing and I’m blinking, I’m blinking. And then all these people around me, I’m just, I’m out of it.”

Strickler went to the emergency room after that, where they discovered, among other problems, that his lungs were bruised. Bruised lungs, also called pulmonary contusions cause fluid and blood to gather around the lung tissue, which can lead to life-threatening complications. The medical staff decided to refer him to Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston as the emergency room did not have the resources necessary to treat him.

“I was put on a respiratory system to get, I believe it was carbon dioxide that was just roaming around, out of my body,” Strickler said. “And if that didn’t work, they were going to stick a tube in my back to drain it out. But I got it all out just with the respiratory system. So that was like the biggest scare or whatever. Because if I didn’t (get the carbon dioxide out), I would die.”

Strickler was in the hospital for two days. Besides his lungs, he had staples in his forehead, gashes all over his face, permanent road burn and a broken elbow that required surgery, a titanium plate, seven screws and physical therapy to fix. 

“I did go to physical therapy after because I was as weak as we can get,” Strickler said. “I was as weak as a toddler. I could barely pick up a 5 pound dumbbell, just because it hurt.”

Four years later, Strickler still has things he does differently. He rides the bus to school as an extra precaution. He’s careful about road safety and watches over his younger siblings when they’re near any streets. 

“I’m going to be very wary of cars in general, just like crossing, like I might sound annoying or like overprotective, but it’s just, it was scary going through that,” Strickler said. 

But the biggest change in Strickler has been his outlook on life. 

“In the sense of just being more appreciative of what you have, your body, your life,” Strickler said. “Everything could be gone in an instant. That was definitely a realization for me and a kind of awakening for me to be like, life goes by quick.”