After the crash

This is a photo of champion roper Dillon Almason I took before a practice session on a farm north of town about a week or so ago. He is a nice kid, quiet, polite and a top roper in the competiton ring. But this photo is quite different from the photo I took of Dillon the first time we met in June. The circumstances were much more serious.

That’s Dillon being carried to the air ambulance. He was classified an “immediate” requiring a helicopter to take him to a trauma center after he was thrown from his truck in a collision on Lammers Road. Up until the assignment to photograph him with his horse I had no idea if he lived, died or suffered permanent injuries from the crash. That’s the way it goes with the victims of accident scenes, you see them once at one of the worst moments in their life and then never again.

I remember going to this accident, it was a bad one where a sedan and a pickup crashed into each other nearly head-on, the truck with Dillon inside rolling over and ejecting him into the roadway. The crash scene was chaotic with the multiple injuries and the helicopter landing in the still under construction Kimball High parking lot. Some family member implored me not to take pictures as Dillon was carried to the helicopter but the magnitude of the crash and the thought that this might go into a fatal had me shoot the whole crash.

And that was it, back to the office, file the photos and on to the next assignment. I remember we did a follow-up he survived the crash but I don’t even remember hearing his name, just that his dog was missing during the accident. So it was quite the surprise to get the assignment on his recovery and back to the roping circuit.

Most of the time the last image I have of someone involved in an accident is crumpled sheet metal and broken glass in the roadway. You shoot the photos and move on, no reason to dwell on the disasters we cover, there are so many. Family members have talked to me in the past but I think this was the first accident victim I have met after the crash. I wanted to ask what he remembered from the crash and did he see the photos I took but I just didn’t have the heart to ask. With all the things going on today in Tracy it was just enough to see that this story had a happy ending.