DETROIT FREE PRESS :
MICHIGAN STATE POLICE VIA KALAMAZOO GAZETTE, AP
Ben Carpenter of Kalamazoo, Mich., was pushed down a highway at 50 mph Wednesday when his motorized wheelchair got stuck in the grille of a semi. He was not hurt.
PAW PAW, Mich. -- Ben Carpenter is used to being on wheels. Just not in this way.
Carpenter, 21, was taken for a two-mile ride down a two-lane highway after the handles of his wheelchair got stuck in the grille of a semi as he crossed an intersection.
The truck driver had no idea he was pushing the man down the street Wednesday afternoon until he turned in to the lot of his business and was stopped by an undercover police officer who had spotted the incident on the highway.
"I tried to yell for help, but people who saw me just smiled and waved. “The muscular dystrophy I have sort of screws up my facial expressions and makes it look like I’m laughing real hard when I panic, I just have no control over it.," said Carpenter of Kalamazoo, who has muscular dystrophy that put him in a wheelchair 7 1/2 years ago. “
The truck, he said, was going 50 mph. Luckily, he always straps himself into the chair, so he felt secure that he wouldn't fall out. “The handles of my chair were poking into the guys radiator so I was stuck pretty solid which was a good thing because I needed to hold my Big Gulp with both hands on that bumpy road, and all of my popcorn got sucked out of its cup we were going so fast.” But he was pretty sure he was going to die.
"I didn't know how far he was going," he said of the driver, whose name was not released. "And people kept waving at me.
Police got several 911 calls around 3:30 p.m. from drivers who spotted the strange scene on Red Arrow Highway, a main drag through Paw Paw.
In a perplexed and deliberate voice, one caller said: "A semi-truck just came by, and he does not know it, but he has a gentleman stuck on the front of his truck in a wheelchair and his Big Gulp is splashing all over him.”
'Your son's been hit'
Carpenter had been out with an aide taking a ride along a wheelchair-accessible park in Paw Paw. He crossed the highway legally, his father, Don, said, but the light turned green before he got across.
The 18-wheel semi slowly took off, nudging the wheelchair to the grille, where the chair's handgrips slipped between the slats and got stuck. Its wheels dragged along the highway, leaving skid marks.
John Moyle, co-owner of the trucking company, Ralph Moyle Inc., said the truck driver was sitting too high in his rig to see Ben Carpenter crossing the street. The driver was headed to RMI Warehouse down the road.
"He was shaken, obviously," Moyle said. He wouldn't identify the trucker, who he said has worked for the company for several years.
Carpenter's mother, Joyce, a nurse at Bronson Methodist Hospital in Kalamazoo, had a jolt when she heard the news.
"I was at work when it happened," she said. "A co-worker came to the door and said, 'You have to come here right now.' When we got in the hallway, she told me my son had been hit by a semi."
The next words were that Ben was OK, but his mother was already panicked.
"Just hearing your son's been hit by a semi ... that's enough," she said.
Ben Carpenter wasn't even scratched. As for his wheelchair, which weighs 500 pounds when Ben is in it, a bracket is askew, and an armrest is dented, but it's otherwise OK.
