One evening last March in small-town Delaware, June Griffith was on her way to pick up her son Barry from a friend's house when she took a right turn at an unfamiliar intersection. How lost could she get, she figured, on a ten-mile trip between her house in Bear and Newark, just a couple of towns over? Almost immediately, however, she realized that she had gone the wrong way.
She slowed to a crawl and squinted into the dark, searching for a place where she could return to the main road. The headlights in the opposite lane made it hard to see. After a minute or two, she spotted what looked like a road that would take her around the block and back to the intersection. As she turned right, the rear end of her Pontiac Grand Am scraped pavement and the wheels of the car dropped a few inches, landing with a loud thump.
In the dark, Griffith froze. Then she shifted into reverse. The Grand Am's rear tires rolled onto the road behind her, but the front wheel well snagged on something and the car stopped. Griffith realized the problem then: She'd driven onto railroad tracks and the underside of her car was caught.As Griffith, 60, a mother of four and a retired bank customer-service representative, tried to dislodge the car, its swaying headlights attracted the attention of a passerby, Jordan Ricks, a student at Delaware Tech-nical & Community College. He jogged over.
"Ma'am, are you okay?" Ricks asked.
"No, I'm stuck," Griffith replied.
Ricks, 22, could see the potential for calamity. But he tried to appear calm as he instructed Griffith to put the car in neutral. Both of them could now see the wheel well wedged between the rails and the uneven track bed. Ricks put his hands under the front fender and gave it a heave. It didn't move. Six inches, he said to himself. That's all
I have to move it—six inches.
He shoved it again with all his strength. Still, no movement.
From about 50 feet away, a group of students from the nearby University of Delaware campus watched the scene. Ricks motioned to them, and five of the guys trotted over. They clearly were both nervous and amused. "Come on," Ricks told them. "This could be anybody's grandma."
He directed them to different sides of the car, and they all put their hands under the frame. "One, two, three!" Ricks yelled. They all heaved.
"One, two, three!" he yelled again. The car didn't budge.
"Put the car in reverse and lightly tap on the gas," Ricks told Griffith. Then he counted again, and everybody tried to lift the car. One of the guys—they were all in the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity together—suggested they call a tow truck.
At that moment, they felt the ground begin to shake. Then four dings signaled an oncoming train, red beacons flashed from posts on either side of the tracks, and the railroad gates dropped down. In the distance, a fuzzy beam of light appeared, followed by the roar of a horn.
The guys started yelling, "Get out of the car! Get out of the car!" But Griffith felt paralyzed. Other drivers who had stopped their cars began yelling too. The Grand Am was now partially facing forward on the tracks, and when Griffith glanced in the rearview mirror, she saw the train lights approaching. But she worried that the arthritis in her feet would prevent her from escaping in time and that her car would be damaged. One of the fraternity brothers, Tommy Stackhouse, 20, saw her stunned face and knew he had to act. He reached for the car door and yanked it open.
The train was just a few hundred feet away. The brakes shrieked. In the last few seconds, Stackhouse grabbed Griffith's arm and pulled her from the car. His friend, Frank DiPietrapaul, 18, grabbed her other arm, and the pair dragged Griffith to a nearby stoop.
They watched as the train smashed into the Grand Am, crushing it into half its original size and sending metal shards flying. Griffith sat crying as police arrived and sorted through the wreckage—and wrote her a ticket for inattentive driving. Eventually, the students went home.
A few days later, a reporter asked the young men and Griffith to reunite at a local coffee shop. There a tearful Griffith hugged her rescuers: first Ricks, who also broke down in tears, and then the fraternity brothers. When they heard that her insurer was not going to replace the Grand Am, they began cooking up a new scheme.
Griffith's story hit the local TV news that night and caught the attention of a family who were planning to donate a 1998 Volvo to Goodwill. But when they saw Griffith's predicament, they called the frat house instead. The car needed some repairs, and three weeks later, Alex Crespo, another Lambda Chi member who'd been present the night of the crash, organized a party at a local pizza parlor to help pay for the repairs.
Griffith was overwhelmed by their generosity. "These boys are heroes," she would later tell anyone who would listen. "They saved my life."
Ricks feels only gratitude for the outcome. "It was one of those moments," he says, "when we could have been gone together. It makes you think how precious life is."
