A teenage driver was captured on video waving for help as she was being dragged along by a truck after her sedan became stuck beneath it on a highway in Chicago.
Illinois State Police said Laylisha Gardner, 19, was driving north on Interstate 294 in Cook County at around 11.40am on Tuesday when she tried to change lanes and her car got wedged between the semi-truck and the roadway, DailyMail.com reported.
The truck pulling along the black 2005 Honda Accord prompted clouds of dust to rise from the road.
Nobody was injured in the incident, in which trucker Mohamed Yousif, 52, was initially unaware that he was pulling along another vehicle, but eventually pulled over to the side of the road.
The front of Ms Gardner’s Honda was smashed in, including the windshield, and its tires were screeching against the street. Ms Gardner can be seen waving to other drivers in the video, trying to get their attention to alert them of her ordeal and get the trucker to stop.
During the subsequent police investigation, two lanes were closed for around 15 minutes on the Tri-State Tollway.
The footage was posted by Grzesiek Misiek, who wrote on Facebook that he “pulled him over on i294.. I was like wtf happened here... then I saw the car and that person still inside”.
A commenter who said he was a trucker, Robert Laumen, wrote: “This driver should have noticed the vehicle or at least the loss of power from the rig. Blind spots are called blind spots for a reason.”
“People should be flagging the driver and pointing to the problem if they are not aware,” he added. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all there is always something out there to top it!”
According to the National Safety Council, more than 5,000 large trucks were involved in deadly crashes in 2019, which is about 10 per cent of all vehicles involved in fatal collisions.
Large trucks are defined by the organisation as a truck that weighs more than 10,000 pounds (4536 kilos), excluding buses and RVs.
