Was visiting my aunt and uncle there (West Lafayette, IN) when I was 13 as they both attended Purdue University. We had visited the campus that first day.

Later that same evening, I was miraculously spared when a friend/fellow worker of my aunt, volunteered to drive to pick up a pizza on a Friday night (long before pizza places made deliveries) and we were in a brutal accident.

The friend was driving a VW Bug (the old kind they called a "beetle"). I was in the front passenger seat and her 13-year-old son was in the back seat behind her. She attempted to cross two lanes of traffic on a 2-lane divided highway. She thought she was in the middle, between the two lanes (I did too), and had begun to look to her right to see if the traffic was clear for her to turn left. It was night time and she was in her early 30's, but had just gotten a drivers license and this was the first time she had ever driven at night.

The woman wasn't actually in the middle between the two different lanes of traffic, but she had stopped in the middle of the first lane, totally exposing our left side to the oncoming traffic. Suddenly, it was like a camera and I remember the event in frames. We violently pitched to our right as the car flipped about 45 degrees to it's right, and then bounced back to its original position. It happened so fast that I initially wondered if it hadn't been a figment of my imagination. What had actually happened, was that a car had t-boned us traveling at the speed of 65 MPH (according to a highway patrolman after the accident. He said the speedometer was stuck at that speed.). I was totally and completely without injury or even a bump, bruise or scratch. I looked to the two other passengers in our car. The other boy was screaming and the mother was barely conscious and moaning. I jumped out of the car. I remember what seemed like an unenumerable amount of headlights of the cars that were able to stop were beaming on me as I stood there in the middle of the two lanes of traffic. Totally freaked out, I suddenly took off running. We were about 1/2 mile from my aunts and I ran there as fast as I could.

Everyone of the other individuals involved in the accident were greatly injured. What supposedly saved us was we were hit by an Opel GT ("a poor man's vet). The pointed front end sliced more into our VW Bug than pounding us into oblivion. This was 5 years before I learned about and became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and left on a mission after 1 year.

I don't know, but my mind plays with the idea, that somehow I was protected. We all were because despite significant injuries the other 3 individuals involved, they all survived and recovered. The event often comes to mind when I see the word Purdue and I remember seeing the campus that very day.