Woman relives accident horror in Westcliff (From Southend Standard)

Woman relives accident horror in Westcliff

4:00pm Thursday 11th October 2012 in Echo News

A CRASH victim thought she was going to die as a car collided with another before mounting the pavement and crushing her against a wall.

Toni, 24, was walking back from her lunch break with two colleagues when the horror smash happened in Preston Road, Westcliff.

She was trapped between the Ford Fiesta and a garden wall, until passers-by and people from nearby businesses rushed out to help.

A group of them helped drag the car a few inches off of her and stayed with her until the emergency services arrived.

Toni, who suffered a broken right femur, broken left foot and a shattered left wrist, said: “We were in the middle of a normal conversation when all of a sudden the Fiesta veered off from the impact with the Mercedes and it came straight towards us. It pinned me against the wall.

“It happened so quickly, I had no time to think. My world went silent, I remember them hitting and thinking what a nasty crash and the next thing the car was coming for me. I thought I was going to die.

“I was very lucky that the road sign it hit wedged it and stopped it going any further.”

Toni, an account manager at a Westcliff advertising agency, described it as the scariest thing ever to happen to her.

She said: “When I realised I was still alive I thought I had lost my leg as below my knee didn’t feel connected and it was pure agony.”

She spent a week in hospital and needed emergency surgery to insert a metal rod from her hip to her knee and a metal plate and pins in her wrist which had three fractures.

Two weeks on she’s still in pain and is virtually housebound. She needs help washing and dressing.