Zack Swets, a Portage firefighter/paramedic, was one of the initial first responders to arrive on the scene after a call came into 911 dispatch that there was a car in a ditch under Interstate 94 and it had been there for multiple days.
The dispatcher said the driver was still alive and talking and had been stuck in his car and unable to get out.
Whatever first responders who got the call on the afternoon of Dec. 26 were expecting, said battalion chief Ross Steffel, “it wasn’t that.”
“Where the truck was and the amount of damage to it, I won’t say it caught us off guard but it took us aback. To have someone still in there talking to us was remarkable,” Steffel said.
He and other first responders didn’t know at first how long Matt Reum, 27, of South Bend, had been trapped in his pickup along Salt Creek under the interstate. That information, Steffel said, came as he and other rescuers worked to get him out of the truck.
Swerving to avoid animal caused rollover crash
With humor, gravity and expletives, Reum recounted his story of survival in a lengthy interview with the Post-Tribune.
Sitting in a meeting room at the Valparaiso branch of the Porter County Library on Feb. 13, Reum offered additional details about what happened the night of Dec. 20, when he crashed his gunmetal silver 2016 Dodge Ram 1500 Laramie Limited, and insight into how he kept himself alive as his hope of being found began to fade and he fought against three suicide attempts over a matter of days.
“The first day, your mind almost goes into a state of, it doesn’t matter what it takes, I have to stay alive,” he said.
Reum, a welder with Boilermakers 374 in Hobart, had headed to the local’s workshop for three days to work with apprentices when he got a call the night of Dec. 20 that a friend who lived in the region had died his and funeral would be that Friday, Dec. 22, in Missouri. The call came from his friend’s mother.
Reum did some pre-Christmas window shopping at Southlake Mall in Hobart and stopped at Hooters for a couple of drinks before heading back around 10:30 p.m. to Mishawaka, where he lived at the time, so he could get ready to leave for the funeral the next day.
Though Reum usually takes the toll road east, he mistakenly got on I-80/94. He took the closest exit ramp in Portage, heading back west on I-80/94 so he could grab the toll road.
The weather was foggy and visibility wasn’t good, Reum said. As he was driving, he spotted a pair of eyes in the road. While driving lessons direct drivers to hit an animal in the road rather than swerve to avoid it, Reum swerved because he didn’t want to damage his truck when he had to leave for a funeral the next day.
He ended up on the shoulder of the interstate and bounced off a guardrail, which took off the tire on the front driver’s side of Reum’s truck.
“That started sending me down the hill and I went sideways and hit a patch of rocks, and that’s when I started rolling and lost consciousness,” he said. “I didn’t come to until my truck came to rest on the river bank and that’s where it sat for six days.”
Drinking highway runoff, journaling ‘kept me alive’
Reum’s cellphone had been in a holder in his center console. After the crash, in which his truck landed upright under the highway, he spotted the phone between the passenger door and the dashboard. Pinned under the dashboard and with the truck’s steering wheel resting on his left leg, Reum couldn’t reach the phone. The phone was facing away from him but he tried using its voice activation to call for help, only to realize the battery was nearly dead.
“When you’re driving somewhere you’ve been so many times, you don’t care about your phone battery,” he said.
His horn wasn’t working because his car battery was destroyed and his truck’s communication system, which could call 911 in an emergency, also didn’t activate. Reum was losing feeling in his left leg, which was underneath the dashboard.
Reum, who said he was wearing his seatbelt at the time of the crash, went to sleep and awoke at early dawn.
“I started looking around because it was at night when I wrecked. I started seeing how bad everything was and it was like, oh (expletive),” Reum said.
He spent the first couple of hours screaming for help to no avail. His wristwatch helped keep him sane but he still lost track of what day it was.
Reum started throwing broken trim and whatever else he could out of the truck to give himself as much room as possible. His right hand was shattered in 16 places, he found out later, but “I still have to use it like normal because I don’t have a chance otherwise.”
He kept calling for help, resting intermittently to save his strength, and knew his situation wasn’t good because of where he was under the bridge. The windows and sunroof in his truck had shattered so he could hear cars overhead and the nearby creek, but nobody could hear or see him.
“I was kind of out of sight, out of mind,” he said. “This is where the timeline gets sort of weird because your mind plays tricks on you.”
When his ordeal came to an end, Reum thought he’d been trapped in the truck for nine days instead of six, though he was able to keep track of time initially. He passed the first day trying to make the best of things.
The weather turned rainy the second day but he was under the bridge and couldn’t get any water directly. A drainage pipe from the interstate emptied under the bridge and was over the truck’s broken sunroof.
Reum had a travel-size bottle of mouthwash with him “because I always like my breath smelling good. I’m a bachelor; I have to stay minty fresh all the time.” Joking aside, he used the sunroof’s visor as a funnel to channel water into the small bottle.
“I tasted that water and it tasted absolutely terrible,” he said, adding the water was a mixture of spilled fuel, dirt and other material washed off the interstate by the rain.
He grabbed a pair of clean sweatpants and used them as a sponge to soak up the rainwater, then squeezed it into the bottle.
“It filtered it enough that I could actually drink it and I didn’t feel like I was going to throw up,” Reum said.
It rained a couple of times while Reum was trapped but the slow drip from the highway drainage pipe would last for five or six hours after the weather passed, so he could still collect water to drink.
“Honestly, it kept me alive. A lot of things kept me alive through the whole thing,” he said.
He started journaling a couple of days or so after the wreck. Journaling wasn’t easy with a broken right hand but Reum stuck with it, making out a list of things he wanted to accomplish each day, like getting his phone, its charging cord and charging pack. He used a broken windshield wiper blade to gather the charging cord and pack, but still couldn’t reach the phone.
He tried to take the truck apart as much as he could in an attempt to free himself. He had a paring knife on the floor of the passenger side and used the wiper blade to try to nudge it closer so he could grab it, to somehow cut himself out of the truck, but the knife was beyond reach.
Reum thinks he celebrated Christmas Eve two days early but he can’t be sure. Trapped in his truck, he started losing hope.
“Things got dark. Those sweatpants that saved my life, I tried to end my life twice (with them),” he said, adding he heard someone, perhaps his best friend’s voice, telling him to stop.
He tried to cut his wrists with the broken glass in the truck. Bits of it had cut his lap in the wreck but “safety glass does not cut very well,” he said.
Because he’d packed clothes to stay in Hobart for a few days and had them in an overnight bag he could reach, Reum changed shirts every two or three days so what he had been wearing could dry. He also was able to change his jacket and sweater.
After the suicide attempts, “it rained again, which was nice because I could drink water and I had a system down,” he said.
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He focused on hydration and didn’t think about food. He also wasn’t in much pain; that would come later.
“There were a couple days, ‘days,’ and this is my timeframe, there were a couple days where all I would do is yell, take a nap, yell and take a nap, trying to conserve as much energy as possible,” he said.
He also hallucinated and his dreams and hallucinations ran together.
“I would wake up and think I was still in the dream. I was an assassin and I was sent to kill my legs. My last task was cutting my legs off and then I could retire,” he said, adding he thought maybe he had to cut his legs off to get out of the truck but he couldn’t reach the paring knife.
On Reum’s sixth day in the truck, on Dec. 26, he woke up and started writing. He had lost hope that he would be found.
“In my mind, it’s day nine down there. Nobody’s seen me, nobody’s heard me,” he said, adding a couple of times, he thought workers with the Indiana Department of Transportation were doing roadwork on I-94 directly above him and wondered why they didn’t answer when he called for help.
“In my notebook, I end up writing goodbye letters to my friends and family,” Reum said, adding he wrote his obituary and a last will for his best friend, as well as a suicide note he had penned earlier.
He handed the moleskin journal to Zack Swets, one of the Portage first responders at the scene, but later threw it out. It was soaked, he said, and was full of things he needed to get rid of.
Though his notebook at first chronicled what he hoped to accomplish and what he did toward survival, the writings darkened with his mood.
“You could almost see a decline in my own mental fortitude,” he said.
At one point that day, Reum heard something. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it woke him up. About that time, fisherman Mario Garcia, who had been looking for a place to fish with his son-in-law, Nivardo De La Torre when they found Reum’s truck, pulled open the curtain airbag from the truck.
Reum hadn’t talked to or seen anyone since his wreck.
“I thought I was hallucinating then. My first question was, ‘Are you real?'” Reum said.
Garcia, of Hobart, told De La Torre, who lives in Portage, to call 911.
“The entire time, I think it’s a hallucination,” Reum said.
Reum was “asleep or something” when the two found him, Garcia has said, and the fishermen didn’t think he was alive until they touched him.
“He was so glad to see us,” Garcia said the day after the rescue.
“Just the look on his face, it was like, ‘What are you guys doing here?’” De La Torre said then. “He was in shock just as much as we were.”
Reum heard sirens overhead but thought they were going to continue on their way, as they had all the other times he heard them from his truck. He heard them slow and then stop, and heard voices.
A trooper with the Indiana State Police was the first one down the embankment.
“Almost instantly after that, fire trucks started coming, maybe two ambulances. My whole thing was coming to terms with the fact that I was being rescued,” Reum said.
Swets, Steffel and Jordan Bucy, a Portage firefighter/paramedic, were the first rescuers on the scene after the trooper. They put Reum in a neck brace to stabilize him and started an IV.
“I think it finally clicked for me when I started feeling that pain,” Reum said, adding it was like a bucket of cold water. “Yep, you’re alive now and you’ve gotta make it to the hospital.”
Despite the pain and clearing confusion, Reum cracked jokes with his rescuers. He’s not a comedian, he said, but he can be in certain situations. In the obituary he penned in his journal, Reum wrote that anybody who cried at his funeral would get kicked out.
Painstaking rescue required disassembling truck, helicopter
Porter County Central Dispatch received the 911 call from the fishermen at 3:45 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 26 about the crash off I-94 at the Salt Creek overpass one mile east of the Portage exit.
First responders found Reum’s truck on the side of an embankment. They had to stabilize the pickup before they could begin extrication.
“We had the terrain working against us,” said Portage firefighter/paramedic Jordan Bucy.
Salt Creek was five feet from where Reum’s pickup landed and the terrain was rocky and sloped, the rescuers said. They got the doors off.
“We knew he was pinned in there but we didn’t know the extent,” Swets said, adding they found the truck’s dashboard was pushed into Reum’s lap.
An extrication that would have taken 20 or 25 minutes on a road took around an hour, in part because rescuers had to haul the equipment they needed from their firetrucks down the embankment.
“Even the time of 45 seconds going from the truck to the crash had to be accounted for,” Bucy said.
“Once we got more people there, we literally had a line of people handing equipment down,” Steffel added.
Swets requested a helicopter as rescuers were pulling onto I-94, given the report they received from dispatch, to get Reum in an ambulance and to the helicopter for hospital transport as fast as they could.
Rescuers kept Reum apprised of the extrication process, telling him what they were doing and what he could expect as they worked to disassemble the truck and get him out of it.
“He was in pain once we moved him,” Steffel said.
Rescuers placed Reum into a Stokes basket, a stretcher for transport, to get him back up the embankment and into the ambulance for the one-quarter-mile ride to the waiting helicopter.
Taking Reum up the embankment the same way rescuers and their equipment came down wasn’t going to work because it was so rocky.
“Another crew actually cut all the trees and brush” so rescuers had an easier time transporting Reum, Swets said. Eight rescuers carried Reum up the embankment.
“It was the safest way we could do it,” Steffel added.
Reum’s vital signs at the crash site and later in the ambulance were within stable limits and he was conscious, alert and talking throughout the rescue.
“We knew he was injured. We didn’t know to what extent. As far as him making it and surviving, he had a pretty good chance,” Steffel said.
Bucy said that anyone driving by the spot on I-94 where Reum went down the embankment wouldn’t have noticed his truck from the road. “Probably thousands of people drove by it in six days,” he added.
The mild weather for late December helped Reum survive, rescuers said, just one of the many things that were in his favor.
“Just the fact that he survived the initial crash is amazing,” Steffel said, adding he’s seen less extensive wrecks where drivers didn’t survive. “There are so many things that could have happened, that could have made it not the outcome that it was.”
The details surrounding Reum’s survival are what make it amazing, Steffel said.
“In my opinion, it was divine intervention or something,” Steffel said. “There were so many things that had to go right for him to be here and they did, which you don’t see very often.”
‘It’s very humbling. I don’t feel like a hero’
The Spring Lake Chapter of the Izaak Walton League in Hobart was filled with members and guests on a recent Monday night for a regular business meeting and to honor two fishermen with donated, one-year memberships to the conservation club.
“It’s not every day we are privileged to honor a fellow fisherman, let alone two,” said Joe Coleman, the chapter’s first vice president, as he called Garcia and De La Torre to the front of the room, where they were greeted with a standing ovation toward the end of the Feb. 12 meeting.
They had been sitting at a corner table toward the front of their room with their families and Reum, who came to see his rescuers, and now friends, honored for their effort in saving his life.
Coleman gave a quick recap of the story and said Garcia and De La Torre were looking for a place to cast their lines when they found Reum in his truck, who said he had been pinned there for six days.
Soft expressions of wonderment made their way through the meeting hall in waves. “Wow!” said one person, followed by “Damn!” by another.
The chapter, Coleman said, thought the two fishermen deserved recognition.
“It was more than fate that took you to that direction that day,” Coleman said, thanking them and welcoming them to the chapter.
In addition to the memberships, the pair also received gift cards, gift baskets, and fishing rods.
“It’s very humbling. I don’t feel like a hero,” Garcia said, adding anybody would have done the same thing. “We were so fortunate to be at the right place at the right time. Glory goes to the one who got us there. He deserves all the praise.”
De La Torre thanked the chapter and the crowd.
“Now my wife can’t say anything when I say I want to go fishing,” he quipped.
As the meeting came to an end, Reum made his way to the front of the room for pictures with Garcia and De La Torre. Coleman, meanwhile, credited his wife Priscilla Coleman for putting together the recognition.
“They deserved it just for the recognition,” she said, fighting back tears. “It’s such a heartwarming story.”
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‘It was a Christmas miracle for us instead of a Christmas tragedy’
Reum’s parents, Rex and Christie Reum, live in Atlanta, Georgia after Rex’s job as an aerospace engineer had the family moving around the country.
Rex Reum said they texted their son frequently and, as Christmas approached, thought he might be going skiing, something his son had mentioned a couple of weeks before his wreck. He didn’t have plans to visit his family for the holiday. They texted their son on Christmas and didn’t hear back.
“Usually he’s right on it,” Rex said, adding other family members also texted him that day and couldn’t reach him.
The day after Christmas, a family friend who is active on social media saw a post about how two fishermen found Reum alive in his truck and forwarded it on to Reum’s parents. Shortly after that, Rex Reum booked a flight from Atlanta to South Bend.
The news, Rex said, brought relief.
“Yeah, he’s been seriously injured, but he’s alive,” he said.
He praised first responders for how they handled his son’s left leg before it was amputated after his rescue and said doctors at Beacon Health South Bend Memorial complimented their actions, which prevented ancillary damage to the rest of his body.
“A lot of things came together for Matt,” he said.
Reum, his father said, likes to live life and has been out of the house for a while as an adult but has been through “a tremendous ordeal,” and will have good days and bad as he continues to navigate after his wreck.
“This is his story and I’ve told him that,” Rex said, adding he and the rest of the family are thankful De La Torre and Garcia found him.
“It was a Christmas miracle for us instead of a Christmas tragedy.”
‘One of the biggest things is acceptance, but I accepted this’
A waiting helicopter airlifted Reum to South Bend Memorial, selected because it’s a Level II trauma center, given the severity of his injuries, and because it was close to where he lived.
The first couple of days there, Reum said, “were kind of fuzzy.”
Doctors ran their fingers along Reum’s left leg. He couldn’t feel anything below his shin. The day after he arrived at the hospital’s intensive care unit, on Dec. 27, doctors amputated his leg below the knee. A couple of days later, Reum underwent another surgery to amputate above his knee.
Before the second surgery, Reum joked with surgeons that they were going to cut off his “chicken nugget.”
He and his father, Rex, found humor where they could. Reum said his father told him that the one good thing about his wreck was that he could get handicapped parking.
His response?
“Dad, I thought about that four days ago. I get handicapped parking for life!”
The dark humor didn’t make Reum’s leg amputation any easier, even if it wasn’t a surprise.
“I kind of had an idea in my head that my leg was already (expletive) that first day because I couldn’t feel it,” he said. “Being mentally prepared for it and having a doctor tell you is a little different.”
He moved out of the ICU and into rehab, where his friends came to visit and he was reunited with some of the first responders who helped him on Dec. 26, as well as Garcia and De La Torre.
Reum had more than 1,500 messages that came in as people found out about his story. When pain would wake him up at 4 a.m., he would go through them and start to respond. Many people told Reum his story was inspirational.
“I’m just me,” he said. “I’m not inspirational but my story is,” he said.
Reum was released from rehab on Jan. 16 and has moved into a different apartment, and still has ongoing medical and therapy appointments. He gets around with a walker with blue tennis balls on the back legs and an armrest with a Velcro strap for his right arm as his shattered hand continues to heal.
“I don’t want to use this forever,” he said, gesturing toward the walker. “Do you know how hard it is to walk around a bar with it?”
He has started physical therapy on his hand after receiving physical and occupational therapy while in rehab.
Reum fought an infection at the amputation site from fluid buildup but hopes to get a compression sleeve for his amputated leg, the first step toward being fitted with a prosthetic leg. That could happen this spring.
“One of the biggest things is acceptance, but I accepted this,” he said, lifting his left leg, “while I was still sitting in my car.”
Once he’s getting around more easily and better prepared mentally, Reum would like to go back to the crash site with his best friend and her partner, a social worker, so he has the emotional support he needs.
He remains close to Garcia and De La Torre and shared one of his goals with them.
“I want to do a 5K (run) for Thanksgiving,” Reum said, adding he cycled and stayed in shape before his wreck. His new apartment building has a Peloton stationary bicycle, but “it’s hard to do with one leg.”
Reum would like to write a book about his experience and become a motivational speaker. He held up a copy of “127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” which chronicles hiker Aron Ralston’s experience amputating his right arm after getting trapped under a boulder while canyoneering alone in the Utah desert.
“That’s kind of where I want to go towards,” he said.
Reum hopes to use his story to help anyone struggling with their mental health. He admitted he sought help before his wreck but there was a nine-month wait to get an appointment.
“I’m not a mental health professional but I’ve been through (expletive). I can help people,” he said.
As word of his experience spread, people reached out to him to say they had been suicidal but his story helped them carry on. “Messages like that make my (expletive) day.”