The night's literally a nightmare.
Jared and Paige Estes, the picture-perfect couple married just six months, leave a hockey game with two friends. They're driving down Kellogg, near West Street, when a Porsche going more than a hundred miles an hour slams into them.
"I don't remember getting hit or how long I was in the car," Jared says. "I went black. Everything kind of went black when we were driving down the street. Then I heard a really, really loud bang, like an explosion. I could've been in there 30 seconds or 30 minutes, I don't know."
The car's now on fire; so's Jared. Lucky for him, someone driving by stops and pulls him out of the car.
"I looked down at my hands and they just looked really weird and they felt really hot, both of them did," he says. "And I turned them over and there was just one piece of my shirt between my wrists and it just burned away right there."
Jared knows he's in trouble, but he's more concerned about his wife and friends; he doesn't know if they're still in the burning car.
"It was like waking up in hell is what it was like," Jared says. "I don't know what hell's like, but that's what I would imagine. There was fire and it felt darker than dark."
Through the darkness, Jared sees bodies lying on the road. Even though he's been burned on about half his body, he drags himself down Kellogg to see who's there. "I just knew that one of those or both of those had to be my wife and my friend because there was no way they were in the care because it was engulfed and there was nothing left of it," he says.
Jared never gets to see if the bodies are the people he loves. The paramedics get to him first. They force him on a stretcher. "They were fighting me a little bit," he says, "I was fighting them quite a bit, because I wanted to know where Paige was. I was screaming for Paige. They kept saying we don't know; we don't know and I was persistent and would not let them work on me and then finally one said yes, everybody got out."
But everybody does not get out. Jared's beautiful, young wife Paige is trapped in the car. Jared doesn't know, because by now, he's in a coma, a nightmare that lasts two long weeks before he finds out the love of his life is now nothing but a memory.
"I needed to get to her grave, because that was as close as I could get to her, without actually being with her," Jared says.
But before Jared can get to Paige's grave and heal his heart, he first has to heal himself.
