Michael Gay: Through the Flames. A burning car, a woman’s screams, and a man who refused to let her die

By Vicki Glembocki(photo: Preson C. Mack/Redux) Michael Gay didn’t realize at first that there was a person inside the burning car. In fact, he didn’t even realize that there was a car on fire in the empty field next to the orange grove, 50 miles east of Tampa. They’re always burning diseased trees out here, Gay thought as he drove his truck toward the yellow blaze flickering in the blackness of the November evening. But as he got closer, he saw that it wasn’t just a tree: A car’s front end was engulfed in flames. He pulled up next to the blaze and heard a voice: “Help me! Somebody … please … get me out of here! Help!” Jodi Oakes, 29, had finished her shift as a nurse’s aide at Lake Wales Medical Center at about 7:30 p.m. and was driving to Wauchula to pick up a friend. As she approached the turnoff to the narrow county road, something happened. Perhaps she’d misjudged the distance or nodded off. Whatever the reason, Oakes plowed through a stop sign, off the road, and into the field and then slammed head-on into a tree. The engine of her Pontiac sedan immediately caught fire. When Gay heard Oakes yelling, he left his 14-year-old son, Shane, in the truck’s passenger seat and sprinted to the burning car. Another motorist who had stopped told Gay that he had called 911. Peering through the Pontiac’s broken passenger-door window, Gay saw Oakes frantically trying to unbuckle her seat belt. Flames licked the dashboard. The seat belt wouldn’t unfasten. I can’t just stand here and let her die, Gay thought to himself. Gay tried to open the passengerside door, but it was jammed. He pulled out his pocketknife and ran around to the driver’s side. By the time he got there, Oakes’s legs were on fire. Screaming in pain, she leaned back into her seat, trying to dodge the flames now shooting out from under the dashboard and through the driver’s-side window. Gay started to panic. He ran back to the passenger side. Oakes was now engulfed in flames up to her chest. The seat belt was no longer a problem: It had burned clean off. Gay squeezed through the window and into the flames, until he was close enough to grab Oakes’s right arm. He pulled. She didn’t budge. Her left leg seemed to be stuck under the steering wheel. “I was pulling on her, and she was screaming, and I’m thinking, I can’t get her out of here,” recalls Gay. He pulled again, this time so hard that he was afraid he might have pulled her arm out of its socket. Her body suddenly slipped out from under the steering wheel. Gay yanked her through the window, and both of them fell to the ground. The woman’s hair was still on fire. Gay patted it out with his bare hands, feeling no pain himself. Just a few minutes had passed since Gay got out of his truck, but it seemed like an eternity: “I felt like I had run 9,000 miles.” The other motorist helped carry Oakes away from her burning car. Shane grabbed a cooler from the truck bed, dumped out the drinks, and took the ice to his dad and Oakes. Almost all her clothing had burned off. She was coughing and choking, writhing in the weeds “like a worm before you put it on a hook,” says Gay. His body was crashing from the adrenaline rush, and he could hardly move, but while they waited for the ambulance, he kept a hand on Oakes’s shoulder so she would know she wasn’t alone. Oakes arrived at Tampa General Hospital with a broken left leg, a lacerated liver, second- and thirddegree burns over 53 percent of her body, and no memory of the accident. Two weeks later, she received devastating news. Complications from the break had cut off circulation to her lower left leg. She would need to have a below-the-knee amputation. For three months, she remained heavily sedated as she endured skin graft after skin graft. After a month in rehab, during which she was fitted for and learned to use a prosthetic leg, Oakes returned home to her kids, Colen, nine, Carter, six, and Carlie, two. Gay had third-degree burns on both of his hands, but after the accident, he was more focused on how proud he was of his son’s quick thinking at the scene. Even when the commissioners of Polk County, where Gay works as a survey technician, honored him in December, he still couldn’t believe what had happened. “I never thought I’d be able to do something like that,” says Gay, now fully healed. “He didn’t have to stop,” Oakes says. “He didn’t have to do anything. It’s only because of him that I’m alive today. I have three small children whom I now get to be here for. He risked his life … for me.”