MURRAY — A 15-year-old is fighting for his life after the car he was riding in clipped a semitrailer as it changed lanes on I-15 southbound near 5300 South Wednesday afternoon.
The accident, in which the 15-year-old was ejected from the car, closed I-15 southbound for several hours Wednesday night. The boy sustained critical injuries and remained on a ventilator Thursday night.
The teenager was riding in a car driven by a 19-year-old man, and they were driving south when the driver attempted to change lanes by moving between two commercial semitrailers traveling southbound in the same lane, according to Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Jayson McCleve.
“He tried to change lanes, in between the semi trucks ... and he clipped one of them,” McCleve said. He said the young driver tried to “shoot the gap” between the two trucks, and he “clipped the back (truck), causing (the car) to spin.”
Both the 19-year-old driver and 15-year-old passenger were wearing seat belts, but when the car spun, the passenger door was ripped off and actually became embedded in the front end of the truck.
“That tore the seat belt off and the (15-year-old) was ejected when the car rolled,” McCleve said. “We believe it rolled three times.”
McCleve said investigators aren’t sure how the seat belt was torn — if it was the force of the crash or the velocity of the spin, which eventually caused the car to roll — but they did determine he was wearing a seat belt when the accident occurred.
“The unrestrained 15-year-old passenger was thrown from the car, actually ripped the door off the car as they started their spin, and ended up thrown quite a distance from the vehicle,” said Utah Highway Patrol Lt. Nick Street. “One of the incident management workers for UDOT got there, put a tourniquet on the young man, and between the troopers who got there pretty quick and the incident management person, they tried to stop the bleeding as much as they could.”
The driver sustained only minor injuries.
Investigators are still trying to determine why the driver to tried to change lanes between the trucks, as there was less traffic on the road because of coronavirus precautions that have kept many people working from home and reduced travel to only essential trips.