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“I was in front of her around 8 a.m. when I heard a loud bang and looked in the rearview mirror to see a car turned on its side,” Russell Otero told Daily Voice.
The front driver's side tire of the victim's Accord hit a Tesla's rear passenger side tire on River Road near Glenwood Avenue, "and that was enough to turn it onto its side," Edgewater Police Chief Donald Martin said. "They did not seem to be going at a high rate of speed."
Otero, a 52-year-old media sales executive, had just dropped off his daughter at the Academy of Holy Angels in Demarest and was headed to the Edgewater ferry to get to work.
“I jumped out and went to see if anyone was hurt,” Otero said. “There was a women trapped inside. I popped the window in the rear and climbed inside the car to calm the lady down, being that she was stuck and hanging with her seat belt on.”
Otero couldn’t unlock the strap, so he did what he could to try and calm the shocked, crying driver.
Meanwhile, other Good Samaritans held the car steady so it wouldn’t fall onto its roof.
The driver was hospitalized with what responders said weren’t considered life-threatening injuries.
Otero said he “just reacted….I hope that if that was my mother or father someone would do the same.”
ALL PHOTOS COURTESY: Eva Spelbrink Irizarry
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