Good Samaritans get kudos from my family

This was the kind of wreck where heroes are made, where people take drastic measures to render aid to complete strangers and where, if you’re lucky, happy endings happen.

This was the kind of wreck that could have been orchestrated by any fantasyland special effects team, where stunt drivers flip end over end and pyrotechnicians pull together a final scene of twisted metal consumed by flames.

This was no fantasy, however, and a man never regained consciousness as a result, dying in intensive care from a full-system shutdown and brain and spinal injuries.

Yet there were heroes — several of them — who allowed family members the comfort, no matter how slight, of getting a chance to say goodbye. The alternative could have been, should have been, much more grisly.

This is the best way my wife and I know how to say thank you to the heroes who risked their own safety to pull my father-in-law and another man from a mangled car quickly becoming fully engulfed in flames.

This is our thank you to Tim Fulkerson and Will Holzer, and some of their co-workers who would show up minutes later to help.

Fulkerson and Holzer work for Sukut of Santa Ana, a contractor for Sempra Utilities’ San Diego Gas & Electric. They were part of a crew staying in Boulevard working on an SDG&E substation.

California Highway Patrol Officer Mitchell Sanchez of the Jacumba field station said he believes they were just hanging around outside their hotel off Interstate 8 and Ribbonwood Road shooting the bull and maybe drinking a few beers after work when they saw a fireball.

Apparently Fulkerson, the project’s foreman, and Holzer immediately ran to the scene of the accident. Sanchez said one of them is reported to have been a former first-responder.

That’s when the pair came upon my father-in-law, an unconscious passenger, and the other man, occupants of a car that had just flipped end over end after going off eastbound I-8, landing upright on Ribbonwood Road. The engine actually came out of the car, setting nearby brush on fire and somehow setting the rest of the car ablaze.

Word around Sukut is that Fulkerson literally ripped the door off of the car to extract my father-in-law, wrote his supervisor, Don Barnes.

What may have happened, Sanchez said, is one or more of the men tried to bend back the doorframe on my father-in-law’s side, which did happen, because we’ve seen the photos.

Sanchez said they moved onto the driver’s side, ripped that door open and got the driver and my father-in-law out. All the while the back seat and headliner of the cab were burning up.

What was left when both men were removed was a car 80 percent torched, and the Sukut employees not only trying to put out the fire but attempting to revive my father-in-law.

Yes, my father-in-law, Guadalupe Montoya of El Centro, died, and apparently it was his time to do so. But faith in humanity and the simple fact that men will go out of their way to help other men have never been more alive.

My cousin Joe Montenegro works for Sempra, and he tracked down Fulkerson and Holzer’s identities for me and my family, and their boss also gave me some additional information about the wreck and who they are.

All I can say is thank you to all of them, from my wife, Guadalupe’s wife and his son, as well as Lupe’s five sisters. We all thank you.

It’s good to hear from my cousin that SDG&E has plans to honor the men somehow, and now the Highway Patrol at the El Cajon substation wants to do the same.

They deserve it. They didn’t have to do anything but call 911 and wait for the first-responders to arrive. Others might have done that; I’d like to believe many more would not.

To say this accident and his death are fresh to our family is putting it lightly; the wounds are still open, the nerves still raw. But some stories just deserve to be told even in the midst of tragedy still lacking closure.

The heroic deeds of the Sukut crew last week cannot be overstated. These are the kind of guys we want walking this earth — good guys not afraid to get involved and do good things.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Sept. 27, 2013.