BATON ROUGE — As her car was flipping over and over after a collision on May 13, Kelly Ferachi kept calm enough to reassure her 2-year-old nephew in the back seat that it was all fun and games.
“I acted like it was like a ride or something, you know ‘wooooo-eee this is so fun’,” she remembered telling toddler Anders Bullock during the crash.
Ferachi tells UWK that her daughter had done something similar when their car went airborne for a moment after going over a big bump. She recalled the memory at just the right time.
When the flipping stopped, all she heard was silence from the back seat. Little Anders was sitting right behind her.
“I started yelling his name because I didn’t hear from him,” Ferachi said. “He wasn’t crying or anything so I started yelling his name, and it took him a couple seconds to respond. So I started freaking out because he wasn’t saying anything.”
“That’s what I have nightmares of, is him not responding,” she said of the crash on Interstate 110 that left her with a badly broken left arm and other injuries.
The night of the crash, Ferachi, a home health nurse, had a late meeting with a patient. She picked up Anders at her sister’s house in Zachary and was headed home in her Kia Telluride. While going through the governor’s mansion curve, she didn’t even see the Nissan Sentra that had somehow gotten onto the interstate the wrong way.
“I don’t even remember what happened,” Ferachi said. “I just remember the crunch, you know, and then us flipping.”
When it stopped, she realized she couldn’t get out of the SUV because of her broken arm.
Anders was crying and kicking, wanting to get out of his car seat.
A man who saw the crash stopped to help. He urged her to stay still, but she needed to get to Anders, so he helped her out of the SUV.
“I kept falling down and passing out,” she said, but Anders was still trying desperately to get out of the SUV and get to her.
As a nurse, she knows it can be dangerous to move injured people after a crash, but she was more afraid that Anders was going to hurt himself struggling.
The man got Anders out of the back seat and told him that his mom was right there and it was OK.
Anders, quite annoyed, explained to the man that Ferachi was not his mom, saying “my mama is my mother, and THAT is my nanny,” Ferachi remembered. “So mad. He was just angry.”
Anders was also upset that the wreck kept him from spending the night at Ferachi’s house.
One of the toddler’s Spiderman shoes came off in the crash and the man who stopped to help found it and brought it to him.
“I wish I could find out what that guy’s name was,” she said.
Police arrived and Ferachi said they had trouble figuring out what happened. The other vehicle involved was a Nissan Sentra with two women inside. The driver was badly injured, and the passenger had died.
The first officer who spoke to Ferachi asked her which way she was going. She pointed in the wrong direction when she explained what happened and the officer told her she had caused the crash by driving the wrong way on the interstate.
Ferachi was sure she had been going the right way but was devastated to think that she had killed one person and badly injured another.
When she was being treated in an ambulance before going to the hospital, she called her sisters to tell them what happened. Both of them wanted to talk to the paramedics to make sure they knew that Ferachi has hemophilia, a blood-clotting disorder, which means bleeding injuries are a serious problem for her.
Once she had a better understanding of what happened — the Sentra was actually going the wrong way on the interstate and there was an open alcohol container in the car, according to police — she asked officers for the name of the woman who was driving. She wanted to go and check on her in the hospital.
“I hysterically cried to them, begging them, absolutely begging them, to let me know her name, because I wanted to go sit in the hospital with her. . . . I was so scared if she woke up that her family would be upset with her . . . and she’d be alone when she woke up,” Ferachi said. “I just didn’t want her to be alone.”
Police wouldn’t tell her the driver’s name, but she has since learned that Alaja Smith, 23, was hospitalized for a while after the crash.
Smith was booked on June 4 with vehicular homicide, vehicular negligent injuring, driving while intoxicated and possession of alcoholic beverages in a motor vehicle. A blood test showed she had a blood-alcohol reading of 0.189, more than double the legal limit for driving. Smith also tested positive for THC, an active component of marijuana, according to her arrest warrant.
Raven Williams, also 23, was Smith’s passenger, police said. She died at the scene of the crash.
Ferachi said she learned that the two women in the Sentra — both moms — were having a girls’ night out. She’s not angry at them, and said she’s sad for what Smith is having to learn to live with.
“We’ve all done stupid things in our lives, you know. It could have been me. It could have been my sisters. None of us are here to judge,” she said.
She acknowledged that Smith’s choices were reckless and dangerous, but said Smith didn’t intend to harm anyone.
“They were two moms trying to have a fun night,” Ferachi said. “What we’re going through is nothing compared to what she is going through, you know, a broken arm and some head trauma for both of us, is nothing compared to her. I mean, she was unconscious on a ventilator and lost someone very close to her and there’s a child now that doesn’t have a mother.”
Little Anders had a serious concussion and doctors say he should never play contact sports, Ferachi said. He’s still having some back pain.
She said he remembers everything that happened and tells people about their “understate” wreck. He’s become sensitive to sudden driving changes, like when someone has to brake suddenly.
Ferachi was left with pain when breathing or coughing that has proven difficult to diagnose. She also had some facial injuries that were still visible when she returned to work.
Ferachi has some children as home health care patients and called their parents before she went to see them because she didn’t want them to be scared.
“My eye was swollen shut. My jaw was all messed up, and I had to warn them to please tell your child that I look like a monster,” she said.
The kids handled it fine.
Ferachi said she wants Smith to know that she and her family are not angry or vengeful.
“She doesn’t need any judgment from me. She’s judging herself. We’re not the type of people to live with anger. It doesn’t help anybody,” she said. “We’ve wanted her to know from the get-go that we’re not angry.”
Ferachi said she hopes that would give Smith an opportunity to “ease up on herself a little bit” and reduce her guilt from the crash.
A little more than three weeks after the wreck, Anders is back to spending the night with Ferachi routinely and waking up wanting donuts.
“Donuts always make everything better,” Ferachi said.
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