I was witness to an accident where a roadside assistant to a Police Officer was struck by a car, and was flipped over the hood and upended in the air like a rag doll. I could hear his body smack the pavement. And his injuries were nothing like Jessie's. Exaggerate much, Director Miller?
I would like to remind you of the death of Formula One driver Tom Pryce and 19-year old marshal Frederik Jansen van Vuuren in the 1977 South African GP. On a straight, driver Renzo Zorzi was forced to stop his car as it had developed a fuel leak and began to burn.
The situation caused two marshals from the pit wall on the opposite side of track to intervene. The first marshal to cross the track was a 25-year-old panel beater named William (Bill). The second was 19-year-old Frederik Jansen van Vuuren, who was carrying a 40-pound (18 kg) fire extinguisher. As the two men started to run across the track, four cars driven by Hans-Joachim Stuck, Pryce, Jacques Laffite and Gunnar Nilsson were exiting the final corner and coming onto the main straight.
Pryce was directly behind Stuck's car along the main straight, Stuck saw Van Vuuren and moved to the right to avoid both marshals, missing Bill by what Tremayne calls "millimetres". From his position Pryce could not see Van Vuuren and was unable to react as quickly as Stuck had done. He struck the teenage marshal at approximately 270 km/h (170 mph).
Van Vuuren was thrown into the air and landed in front of Zorzi and Bill. He died on impact, and his body was badly mutilated by Pryce's car. The fire extinguisher he had been carrying smashed into Pryce's head, before striking the Shadow's roll hoop. The force of the impact was such that the extinguisher was thrown up and over the adjacent grandstand. It came to ground in the car park to the rear of the stand, where it hit a parked car and jammed its door shut.
The impact with the fire extinguisher wrenched Pryce's helmet upward sharply. Death was almost certainly instantaneous. Pryce's Shadow DN8, now with its driver dead at the wheel, continued at speed down the main straight towards the first corner, called Crowthorne. The car left the track to the right, scraping the metal barriers, hitting an entrance for emergency vehicles, and veering back onto the track. It then hit Jacques Laffite's Ligier, sending both Pryce and Laffite head-on into the barriers. Van Vuuren's injuries were so extensive that, initially, his body was identified only after the race director had summoned all of the race marshals and he was not among them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_PryceWARNING, THIS VIDEO IS VERY GRAPHIC. IT IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK. IT SHOWS A PERSON BEING HIT BY A CAR AND TORN IN HALF. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO A HUMAN BODY BEING HIT BY A CAR IN THAT SPEED. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdUhVP3tnAo
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