It was on a sweltering Florida afternoon, on a desolate stretch of the highway called Alligator Alley, that 8-year-old Kristy Valdes had to climb over her great-grandmother’s dead body.
The Valdes family’s Ford Explorer had flipped and rolled after one of its Firestone tires suddenly shredded, and the impact snapped the neck of Kristy’s 86-year-old relative and bloodied everyone else in the vehicle.
A man who stopped to help had a hard time coaxing Kristy out of the car. “I had to go over my grandma,” Kristy said. “I had to leave my grandma in there and stay far away from the car.”
The July 1999 crash received little notice from the news media or anyone else outside the Valdes’ circle of family and friends. But its circumstances have been repeated dozens of times, plunging Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. and Ford Motor Co. into a widening legal and public relations crisis.
A close look at the Valdes crash and two other accidents reveals much about the deadly combination of Ford’s hugely popular sport-utility vehicle, the Explorer, with recalled Firestone tires.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating 88 deaths and at least 250 injuries and 1,400 complaints of failures involving Firestone Wilderness and ATX tires.
In 935 of the complaints–and 78 of the deaths–the tires involved were installed on Ford Explorers, according to a Tribune analysis of NHTSA records.
The crashes usually happen this way: The tread of the Firestone tire, abruptly and often at highway speed, separates from the body of the tire. Then the driver typically loses control of the vehicle, which fishtails in the direction of the damaged tire and rolls over at high speed. Those not wearing seatbelts are often thrown from the vehicle, sometimes to their deaths. The roof of the vehicle often collapses and sometimes kills or injures even occupants who are belted in.
In the three crashes examined by the Tribune, other parallels emerged.
Each of the tires that failed was on a rear wheel. Tread separation on a rear tire of an SUV such as the Explorer, auto-safety experts say, is much harder to control than on a front tire and is more likely to lead to a catastrophic crash.
In each accident, the tire that failed was more than 2 years old. Treads tend to separate from tires only after protracted fatigue, says Dick Baumgardner, a Georgia-based tire consultant who worked for Firestone for 27 years and since has served as an expert witness for people suing his former employer. “The longer it runs, the greater the risk,” Baumgardner said. “And I think a lot of people have a false sense of security.”
And in each case, the Explorers were carrying heavy loads in hot weather. Experts contend that heat and weight play a role in the failure of the tires, exerting strain on their interior components.
There is another parallel as well: Like many of the crashes attributed to the defective tires, these three exacted a heavy human toll.
In the Valdes case, a family was traumatized by the death of a beloved relative and endured months of physical and emotional rehabilitation. In another crash, a mother lost her only son, a promising college football player. A third accident left two families struggling to repair a lifelong friendship strained by the permanent injuries each sustained.
Susan Krusel, a spokeswoman for Ford, said the company sympathized with the families but denied Explorers are unsafe.
“Every accident involves three factors: the vehicle, the driver and the environment. In a Ford Explorer, you are 26 percent to 28 percent less likely to be involved in a fatal accident than in comparable sport-utility vehicles,” Krusel said.
Firestone spokesman Doug McGraw declined to comment on the cases specifically but said the company is investigating the causes of the tread-separation problem.
“Every auto accident–and these in particular–involving deaths and injuries is tragic, and that’s why we voluntarily had a safety recall,” McGraw said. “We feel every accident is a tragedy, and our heart goes out to everyone involved.”
`It’s too late for us’
It was on the most ordinary of summer days when Amelia Izquierdo, Kristy Valdes’ great-grandmother, arrived at the Valdes’ house in Davie, Fla. The family planned a 90-minute trip to Naples, where a relative was scheduled to perform in a production of the musical “Annie.”
At about 4 p.m., five family members piled into their dark green 1996 Explorer, with Kristy’s father, Rafael, behind the wheel and her mother, Mabel, in the front passenger’s seat. Kristy and her sister, Nicole, sat in the back seat, with their great-grandmother sandwiched between them.
They had been on the road for more than an hour when Rafael felt his steering wheel vibrating and a bumping sensation from the rear of the car.
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The car began sliding to the left, and Rafael tried to turn the wheel into the skid. The car then fishtailed to the right, and Rafael lost control of it completely.
Ironically, the accident happened just a half-hour after Rafael had stopped to change another tire on the vehicle that came apart as the car hurtled along the highway.
It isn’t unusual in the cases he has seen involving Firestone tread problems, Baumgardner says, for separations to occur close together or even simultaneously.
Sometimes, as apparently happened in the first tread separation that day, the tread comes off quickly enough that the driver retains control of the vehicle.
“If it comes off quickly enough, in just a single revolution or two, you are lucky,” said Baumgardner, who is an expert witness in a lawsuit filed by the Valdeses. “You don’t have any pull on the car.”
The second time, the Valdeses weren’t so lucky.
The Explorer hit the highway’s right guardrail at a 90-degree angle and flipped over it, rolling and landing upside down.
Rafael found himself dangling upside down in his locked seatbelt, wedged into the collapsed vehicle. Mabel Valdes tried to unlatch her seatbelt, but the tendons had been severed in three of the fingers of her right hand.
Rafael unlatched it for her, and she crawled out of the crumpled Explorer.
In the back seat, Kristy also was dangling from her seatbelt. Her great-grandmother was motionless next to her, and Nicole, her head covered in blood, was unconscious.
A flurry of strangers surrounded them, trying to help. Someone cut Nicole’s seatbelt and carried her from the car. Mabel clutched her eldest daughter and tried to hold her head wound closed. Inside the car, Kristy tried in vain to get a response from her great-grandmother. One of the men helping cut Kristy’s seatbelt urged her to climb out and, after a moment, she complied.
A helicopter descended onto the scene, adding to the general tumult, and its paramedics whisked Nicole away.
Meanwhile, someone pulled Amelia Izquierdo from the car.
“I saw them put a yellow tarp over my grandma’s body,” Mabel said. “I saw her legs, so I knew.” Soon, ambulances arrived.
Later, at the hospital, the Valdeses learned that Nicole’s head wound, though bound together with 26 staples, wasn’t as serious as it had appeared at the scene. Rafael Valdes suffered an eye injury, bumps and bruises; Kristy had stitches to close a wound on her knee; Mabel had surgery on her injured hand.
But the pain of the injuries, the Valdeses say, was far more tolerable than the grief that followed–especially for Kristy, now 9.
For a long time after the crash, Kristy insisted on sitting in the middle seat during car rides, because she believed whoever sat there might die and she couldn’t bear to lose another relative.
Kristy and Nicole went to their great-grandmother’s gravesite for the first time in December, and it wasn’t until then, Mabel says, that they fully comprehended she was dead.
Mabel, for her part, went through a lengthy physical rehabilitation. She’s left with numbness and three fingers that cannot touch the palm of her hand, which makes it difficult to grip small things like a spoon or toothbrush.
Today, both Mabel, 37, and her husband, 39, drive Toyota Avalons. And they have hired a lawyer, Jay Halpern, who has been suing tire manufacturers for more than a decade.
Mabel discovered, through an Internet message board, that the tires had been replaced in other countries before the news hit the media. The recall has brought memories and emotions back to the surface.
“Everything started all over again,” Mabel said, referring to the recall announced in early August. “It’s too late for us, my grandmother, anybody else who died or was in that type of accident. They should have done something when they knew. They kept quiet for so long.
“I’ll never buy Ford or Firestone,” Mabel said. “They’ll never get my money again.”
`Danny didn’t make it’
“Bye, Mom, see you May 3,” said Daniel Paul Van Etten, a star football player, as he bounded off to a Ford Explorer that was to take him back for his second semester at West Virginia University.
Mom–Kim Van Etten of Jupiter, Fla.–never saw her son again.
She didn’t want to see his body, afraid it would forever replace her image of a tan, 6-foot-4-inch boy with hazel eyes–“280 pounds of beauty,” as she called him.
She remembers the phone call.
“I didn’t understand when they said Danny didn’t make it,” Van Etten said. “What do you mean, he didn’t make it? It was the worst night of my life.”
It was about 1:25 a.m. when Danny lost control of the Explorer on a straight, two-lane section of Interstate 95 in Camden County, Ga. He had taken over the wheel just north of Jacksonville, after he and his friends filled up the tank and grabbed a bite to eat, and had sloughed off his friends’ instructions to wear his seatbelt.
About a half-hour later, the tread separated from the left rear tire and the vehicle overturned, skidding 350 feet before coming to rest on the driver’s side. Country music still blared from the car radio as Danny lay on his back, thrown about 20 feet from the vehicle.
His college roommate, Matt Wilson, clawed his way out of the vehicle, ran to Danny and tried to administer CPR, while another passenger, Dina Karwoski, also tried to help.
“His body was perfectly fine, but he was bleeding from his eyes and from his nose and his mouth and his ears, and then he started to bleed from the back of his head,” Karwoski said in an August 1998 deposition in a lawsuit filed against Ford and Firestone on behalf of Kim Van Etten by a Georgia law firm, Franklin, Taulbee, Rushing. “I saw the cars starting to pull up and I ran toward them, I just ran.”
Part of the shock for many who knew Danny was that such a strong athlete could die so suddenly. From childhood through high school, Danny pitched baseball games. Before 9th grade, his mother wouldn’t let him play tackle football, so as a compromise he played flag football and his father, Michael Van Etten, coached the team.
Recruiters began sending him letters the next year, and he eventually chose West Virginia University from a long list.
“I always wanted him to turn around and say, `Hi, Mom,’ like they do on TV, and he’ll never do that,” she said.
Today, at the start of what would have been Danny’s last college football season, his mother doesn’t venture far beyond a 3-mile radius surrounding her home.
Whenever she sees a gallon of milk, she cries. Danny drank almost a gallon a day. She can’t concentrate unless she knows her daughter, born a year before Danny, is safe. And whenever she finds herself next to an Explorer, she says, she shakes.
When the companies announced the recall, Van Etten’s feelings were equally strong.
“I was thrilled, and yet I was devastated at the same time,” she said. “Why wasn’t it done three years ago? I’ve been telling people all along to take the Firestone tires off their cars, and they thought I was nuts.”
She was outraged, she said, at Ford Chief Executive Jacques Nasser’s TV spot, in which he promises viewers that safety is Ford’s first concern.
“They’ve got to understand what they’ve done to people,” Van Etten said.”I get hate in my heart, and it’s not like I am.”
Fractured friendship
By all accounts, Cub Scout Pack 404 had a successful weekend outing aboard the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier turned tourist attraction that is permanently moored in Corpus Christi Bay.
“It was awesome,” recalled Tommy Foster, 9, whose father, Stephen Foster, was the pack’s assistant leader. “We got to sit in the airplanes.”
The boys–and their parents–had driven up from their border town of Laredo on Oct. 23, 1998, and after two nights of roughing it in military style, everyone was ready to return home.
Raindrops fell lightly on the windshield of Cub Scout leader Hugo Meza’s white Ford Explorer as it headed south on Highway 59 at about 60 to 65 m.p.h.
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A prominent Laredo businessman, Meza, now 40, sat in the front passenger’s seat, his Cub Scout manual open on his lap, a pen in his right hand. His friend from childhood, former college roommate and compadre–Stephen Foster, now 41–was at the wheel.
In the back seat, Tommy sat next to Meza’s son, Carlos Hugo, 9. The boys, who call each other primo, had buckled up their seat belts. But after about two hours on the road, and a lot of pestering, their fathers agreed to let them unbuckle their belts and play cards.
“We were 38 miles out of Laredo, and I heard a pop,” Meza said.
The Explorer flipped four or five times, went off the road and through a barbed wire fence before landing upright in foot-tall Texas buffle grass.
“It was like being inside a washing machine,” Meza said. “I was shouting, `Please God, make it stop.'”
The boys remember little other than the pop. During one of the vehicle’s revolutions, they both went flying out of the shattered glass back window.
“I remember standing up and my body was spinning,” Stephen Foster said. “I picked up my son. He was maybe 15 to 20 feet from the vehicle. I panicked, I saw his arm torn up. I was looking for someone to give him to.”
The skin, veins and tissue on Tommy’s right arm had been scraped off almost to the bone.
Stephen Foster had an injured shoulder and a gash on his head that required eight staples at Mercy Hospital in Laredo.
Carlos Hugo had fractured ribs, a broken clavicle, a scrape on his face and a bruised pelvis.
Meza was the most severely injured. Nerves in his spine had been torn, leaving his right arm paralyzed down to his fingers. His lungs had collapsed and all his ribs had been broken.
“I couldn’t move,” Meza said.
The accident happened within view of a U.S. Border Patrol check point, and agents who rushed to the scene pried open the passenger door to release Meza from the crushed vehicle.
Although no one died in the accident, the injuries had a lasting effect, not least on the relationship between the two families.
Meza, a self-employed businessman who lost the use of his right arm, said his wholesale office equipment company has suffered badly because his injuries prevent him from making his usual monthly sales calls. Nor can he play golf, drive his 1956 Chevy Bel Air classic car or go hunting or fishing.
Tommy Foster, a brown belt in karate before the accident, had to give up aspirations for a black belt. His arm is encased in a tight bandage to keep circulation flowing, and he must wear special padding to in-line skate or ride his bike.
Most telling, however, is that the close friendship between the families has yet to recover.
“We speak every once in awhile,” Stephen Foster said. “We used to get together all the time. His family thought it was my fault. It’s just not the same as it was.”
Michelle Foster, Stephen’s wife, said: “It’s still raw. It’s hard. They have their pain, and we have our pain. How can you compare and how can you say I went through this and you didn’t go through this? Stephen has had his heartaches, pains and depressions.”
Meza said it’s not just the Fosters he sees less frequently.
“We don’t go out much anymore,” Meza said. “We used to do a lot of cookouts–`carne asadas’–we call them in South Texas. But I can’t even hold a can of pop in one hand and open a door.”
Meza said he isn’t spending a lot of time wondering why he was hurt so badly, while his friend walked away from the accident with relatively minor injuries.
“I’m just glad it happened to me, and not my son,” Meza said. “I’ve had my life.”
The families have filed a single lawsuit against Ford and Firestone, but each has its own lawyer — in Meza’s case, a firm called Pasqual & Chumbley and in Fosters’ attorney Christopher Peterson.
Meza said he doesn’t blame his friend for the accident.
“I’m the godfather to his daughter!” exclaimed Meza. “I consider them family, even though they are really not.”
But as Meza grapples with the new limitations on his life, he’s also trying to sort out tattered emotions.
Meza doesn’t know if he would be feeling guilty right now if he had been driving and his friend had been the one badly hurt.
“I don’t know, that’s not the way it happened,” Meza said.
On this, however, both families agree: No more Fords or Firestones.
A couple of years before the accident, Meza had traded in his Chevy Suburban for the Explorer.
“That was my worst mistake, getting rid of my Suburban,” he said. Otherwise, “this would never have happened.”