Officer saves woman from car moments before it explodes
By Bill Kirkos and Ryan Young, CNN
Officer saves woman moments before car explodes
Watch “New Day” and “CNN Newsroom” each Friday to see inspiring stories of officers going above and beyond the call of duty.CNN —
Missouri State Trooper Jim Thuss had just started his shift when he spotted a Cadillac speeding on a stretch of highway in suburban Kansas City.
Activating his police lights and a video camera mounted on his dashboard, he turned his police cruiser around to issue his first ticket of the day.
That’s when an ordinary traffic stop turned into a high speed, albeit brief pursuit. Trying to elude the trooper, Thuss said the man behind the wheel quickly reached speeds approaching 120 mph.
Within just a few seconds, the suspect’s car spun out of control, plowing into the side of a Honda Civic traveling through an intersection.
“It instantly didn’t look good,” Thuss said, recalling the events for CNN. “There was a big plume of smoke, and then (another) big plume of smoke came from the Honda. I could see the fireball.”
Sixty-year-old Becky Crawford was driving her brand new Civic just a couple of miles away from her home. She was awake, but lay helpless and unable to move. According to her husband, Ronald Crawford, the impact broke over a half dozen bones all over her body, including multiple ribs and vertebrae in her back and her neck.
“The force of the seat belt cutting into her was so severe that it cut into her side,” he said, adding that she would later have bruises running from below her knee up to her waist.
The driver responsible for causing the wreck fled the scene on foot. Instead of chasing the driver, Thuss ran to Crawford’s car as flames started to spread.
An off-duty police officer and a good Samaritan who happened to be at the scene asked Thuss if they could help, and the 19-year police veteran told the other officer to go after the suspect.
“I’ve worked a thousand-plus accidents in my career, and once a car catches on fire, the time that they take to go up is pretty quick,” Thuss said.
“Most times you don’t have any time to get a fire like that out, especially one of that magnitude, so I just knew I had to get her out as soon as I could.”
As he approached the burning car, he could smell the gasoline that was leaking down the street. The car was struck at the rear door on the driver’s side, avoiding a direct hit with the mother of two, but causing the car’s tank to rupture.
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Instead of dealing with the mangled metal on her side, Thuss entered from the passenger side.
“I climbed inside, undid her seat belt and asked if she was OK,” he said. “She said she was hurting but I told her I had to get her out of there. I grabbed her underneath her arms and around the shoulders and pulled her across the console and out of the car.”
Thuss carried her up a hill where he put her down, safely away from the growing flames. With his police cruiser dashcam recording the entire dramatic scene, roughly 90 seconds later the car exploded, becoming completely engulfed in fire.
Since hospitalization to treat her injuries, Crawford has started her long rehabilitation at a facility near her home. Her husband said his normally private wife wants people to know how grateful she is for the actions Thuss took in the seconds after the crash. They both have no doubt he saved her life.
“She remembers him reaching in to get her and talking to him … and she remembers he pulled her out of the car as she was looking back at the car and the flames leaping up,” Ronald Crawford said, holding back tears. He partly credits new technology in his wife’s 2015 Civic, and the deployment of side curtain airbags, for allowing her to survive such a violent crash, but repeatedly cites his faith as a reason why his wife survived.
“It’s just a miracle that she was not severely burned. And it’s also a miracle that he was there in time to pull her out, seconds before it would have been too late.”
It’s an overpowering feeling that drove Crawford to recently visit Thuss at his police station to personally thank him, telling him it was a disregard for his own life that saved his wife’s.
“It obviously means something to you when someone’s husband comes forward and thanks you,” Thuss said, “but that’s not why we do our jobs.”
“It’s been an extremely gratifying experience for me, but it’s also been quite humbling for me,” he said. “I’m just happy those kids still have their mother and that the driver was eventually caught. I’m just happy it all worked out like it did.”
At least 9 dead, 11 injured in UPS plane crash and explosion at Kentucky airport
ByBRUCE SCHREINER, HALLIE GOLDEN and DYLAN LOVAN 
Este artículo se ofrece en Español
At least nine people are dead and 11 injured after UPS plane crash in Louisville, Kentucky.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A UPS cargo plane crashed and exploded in a massive fireball while taking off from the company’s global aviation hub in Louisville, Kentucky, killing at least nine people and injuring 11, authorities said.
The plane crashed at about 5:15 p.m. on Tuesday as it was departing for Honolulu from UPS Worldport at Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport.
Video showed flames on the plane’s left wing and a trail of smoke. The plane then lifted slightly off the ground before crashing and exploding in a huge fireball. Video also revealed portions of a building’s shredded roof next to the end of the runway.
The death toll had risen to at least nine on Wednesday morning, and four of those killed were not on the plane, officials said.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said he expects the death toll to increase. Eleven people were also hurt, some of whom had “very significant” injuries, he said.
“Anybody who has seen the images, the video, knows how violent this crash is,” he said.
Beshear said he didn’t know the status of the three crew members aboard the plane, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11 made in 1991.
UPS’s largest package handling facility is in Louisville, and the company announced Tuesday night that it had halted package sorting at the center and didn’t say when it would resume. The hub employs thousands of workers, has 300 daily flights and sorts more than 400,000 packages an hour.
“We all know somebody who works at UPS,” Louisville Metro Council member Betsy Ruhe said. “And they’re all texting their friends, their family, trying to make sure everyone is safe. Sadly, some of those texts are probably going to go unanswered.”
Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg says the National Transportation Safety Board is handling the investigation and sending 28 people.
The airport, meanwhile, was shut down and wasn’t expected to resume operations until Wednesday morning.
“We don’t know how long it’s going to take to render that scene safe,” said Louisville Police Chief Paul Humphrey.
Pablo Rojas, an aviation attorney, said that based on the videos, it looked like the aircraft was struggling to gain altitude as a fire blazed on its left side around one of its engines. Given the large amount of fuel it was carrying, once the fire started in that area, it would’ve been only a matter of time before there was an explosion or the fire grew rapidly.
“Really, the plane itself is almost acting like a bomb because of the amount of fuel,” he said.
The governor said a business, Kentucky Petroleum Recycling, appeared to be “hit pretty directly,” and a nearby auto parts operation was also affected.
Eric Richardson stood outside a police training academy where people gathered looking for information about missing loved ones on Tuesday night, hoping to find out what had happened to his girlfriend. She had been at a metal recycling business near the explosion and wasn’t answering her phone, he told the AP. Her phone’s live location said she was still there.
Bobby Whelan, Richardson’s friend, had been in front of her in line, but had left minutes before the explosion. He said he was about a quarter mile down the road when he heard what sounded like a bomb exploding.
“We don’t even want to think about anything but the best,” Whelan said. “All our friends were there.”
A video taken by Leirim Rodríguez shows several massive balls of flames exploding into the sky in a row, followed by large billowing clouds of black smoke.
Tom Brooks Jr., who runs a metal recycling business down the street, said the unbelievable magnitude of the crash “just rocked the whole place.”
“This was massive. I mean, it literally looked like a war zone,” he said.
Destyn Mitchell was working as a host at an Outback restaurant, about a 15-minute drive from the crash, when she heard a loud boom.
“The mood in the restaurant was very shaken up,” she said. “Everyone is really concerned. People who just sat down to eat got up and left in under 30 minutes and packed up their food because they wanted to hurry up and get home.”
The Louisville airport is only a 10-minute drive from the city’s downtown, which sits on the Ohio River bordering the Indiana state line. There are residential areas, a water park and museums in the area.
Is the Ending of Netflix Doomsday Thriller A House of Dynamite Brilliant or a Cop-Out?
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Staff Writer
Warning: This post contains spoilers for A House of Dynamite.
If the American government had less than 20 minutes to decide the fate of humanity in the wake of an unattributed nuclear missile being fired at the U.S., what would they choose to do?
This question supplies the premise of A House of Dynamite, a new military-industrial thriller from The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow now streaming on Netflix, which been lauded by critics since its Venice Film Festival premiere. Almost the entirety of the nearly two-hour film unfolds over the course of that brief impact window, with the same roughly 18-minute interval playing out on screen three times over from the perspectives of different military and political officials.
A House of Dynamite opens with Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), senior duty officer in the White House Situation Room, arriving for what she believes will be a routine day on the job, only to be notified of the missile launch and forced to leap into action to attempt to neutralize the threat. Meanwhile, at a missile-defense base in Fort Greely, Alaska, Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) and his team are charged with firing two ground-based interceptors capable of destroying the incoming warhead, which has been determined to be inbound for Chicago. They fail to hit their target, an outcome we learn has a nearly 50 percent chance of occurring. Or, as Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (Jared Harris) puts it, “So, it’s a f-cking coin toss?!”
In the second act, we see the contrasting approaches to the situation presented by General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), the senior military officer at United States Strategic Command, and Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso). The former advises POTUS (Idris Elba) to execute an all-out blitz on all possible suspected nuclear powers while the latter advocates for him to stay his hand and do nothing. The final section of the movie then alternates between Baker, who is more focused on getting in contact with his Chicago resident daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) than offering his counsel, and the President, who has the ultimate say on the government’s course of action.
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The perpetrator of the attack is also never identified, an ambiguity that screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (The Maze Runner, Jackie) said was intended to prevent any audience scapegoating. “[T]he entire world has built this system where we have nine nuclear countries,” he told Deadline. “We’ve got thousands of weapons, any one of which could go off at any given time, based on either the decision of an insane person in a leadership position or a mistake. So, we wanted to focus on the system, not any one bad actor or villain.”
How does A House of Dynamite end?
After being rushed away from a charity basketball event, our unnamed POTUS is handed the so-called Black Book and told by nuclear football handler Lieutenant Commander Robert Reeves (Jonah Hauer-King) that he must pick from a selection of retaliatory strike options. A House of Dynamite‘s president is presented as a seemingly measured and compassionate leader. And yet, that offers little to no comfort in the face of such catastrophic circumstances.
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“That is the point we wanted to make,” Oppenheim told Deadline. “Even in the best-case scenario, if you had a president who is thoughtful, responsible, informed, deliberative—to ask someone, anyone, to make a decision about the fate of all mankind in a matter of minutes while he’s running for his life simultaneously is insane.”
Then, just as POTUS is about to announce his choice, the screen cuts to black and the credits roll, leaving the question of what’s to come deliberately unanswered. In some ways, it seems fitting to be left with our own musings on how we believe the government should respond to such an unthinkably dire crisis. But in the wake of that buildup, the film’s shockingly anticlimactic ending also feels like somewhat of a cop-out.
From a pure entertainment value standpoint, we’ve just sat through two of the tensest hours of filmmaking released this year. After all that, we don’t get the satisfaction of things being tied up neatly, on one hand, or the dread-inducing finality of a big explosion, on the other. Thanks to disaster movies of the past, we’ve been trained to expect at least our hero to make it to the other side, even if there are casualties along the way or the world order requires rebuilding. With A House of Dynamite, there is no such catharsis. There’s not even a hero.
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Read More: Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite Is Skillful, Stressful, and Urgent
Impactful restraint, or frustrating lack of resolution?
A House of Dynamite clearly has a point to make about the fragility of a system that relies on mutually assured destruction as a deterrent, particularly in today’s increasingly turbulent political climate. However, it ultimately opts not to take a definitive geopolitical stance beyond the ideas that decision-makers are woefully underprepared to handle such a moment in a non-theoretical situation and nuclear armageddon would be capital-B Bad. Challenging viewers to reflect on the perpetual war-like state of our world is all well and good. But should the existential burden of the ways in which the most powerful people on Earth might choose to destroy us really be ours to bear?
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For Bigelow’s part, the answer seems to be yes. In an interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, she described the film’s cliffhanger as a call to action. “I felt like the fact that the bomb didn’t go off was an opportunity to start a conversation,” she said. “I’d like to see people decide they don’t want to live in a world that’s this volatile or this combustible. And then of course, the next step is to reach out to their representatives and try to, you know, create a movement.”
