Frightening event during I-79 rescue brings two men together
Andy Ullom said “all I felt I could do safely” in the early hours of July 9 was to stand in front of an injured man who’d been dragged by his own pickup truck when he stopped to help at a crash on Interstate 79 in Collier Township.
“We did have a vehicle come within two feet of getting the both of us,” Ullom said. “They swerved at the last moment.”
Ullom, 37, and Todd Krut, 54, of Claysville, had stopped after what Ullom called “one of the hardest impacts I’ve ever seen a vehicle make” on a dark stretch of I-79 south near the Carnegie exit, when a Kia Sportage hit a guardrail beside the median about 2:30 a.m. Their attempt at helping the man in that car took a different turn when the driver of the Kia made off with Krut’s Ford F-150, dragging Krut about 100 feet and leaving him in the road unconscious when he tried to stop the thief.
“(Ullom) was a godsend,” Krut said. “If he wasn’t there, I would have probably gotten hit by a car.”
Ullom, who also lives in Washington County, said he was surprised the driver of the Kia was able to walk around after the “violent, brutal” crash he’d been in, but the man seemed to be in a hurry to get out of there. After Ullom first got out of his truck, the man asked him for a ride to the hospital. Soon afterward, Ullom was sitting in his truck on the phone with a 911 dispatcher, and the man asked for a ride to the nearby Carnegie exit, about a mile down the road.
Ullom didn’t even see the man get into Krut’s truck, but he saw the lights in the truck come on with Krut beside it before it took off.
Still on the phone with 911, Ullom got out and started running after the pickup before he came upon Krut, whom he didn’t want to move on his own. Soon, several other drivers Ullom said identified themselves only as firefighters from Washington County also stopped to help, and they moved Krut from the road before more assistance arrived.
“I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart,” Krut said last week. “Thank God they were there.”
The suspect – Ivan Sadler, 54, of Washington – was jailed July 12 on a parole violation after police said they found him in West Finely Township with a stolen vehicle. State police charged him the following day with receiving stolen property and false identification, and authorities described him as a suspect in burglaries in multiple counties.
Krut said he last remembers his hand being stuck in the rear driver’s side door of his pickup before he woke up in the emergency room of Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh later that morning.
Krut said he was released from the hospital July 13. A toe on his right foot and five bones in his left are broken. His feet are in air casts. He also has a “pretty big goosebump” where the back of his head split open, and road rash on his chest, the side of his face, back and shoulders. He expects it to take “close to four months” before he can go back to his job fixing forklifts, which requires him to be on his feet.
“I’m going to go stir-crazy sitting around doing nothing,” he said.
Krut and Ullom were strangers before the accident, but Ullom got in touch with Krut’s family through Facebook. He first visited him at the hospital July 11 and returned twice more.
“That first meeting was pretty emotional,” Ullom said.