In Their Own Words: Trapped After a Car Crash | 1

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0:32From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds, In Their Own Words.

0:45In December of 2023, Matt Ream was enjoying life as a union boilermaker. Just 27 years old, he traveled the country rebuilding power plants, refineries, and steel mills. One night, he drove home to South Bend, Indiana, to pack a few things to attend a friend's funeral in Missouri. After that, he planned to hit the slopes in Colorado. It was the week before Christmas, and Matt found himself driving in the fog.

1:16Matt Reum:After about a mile or so, that's when I see a flash of something in the road, and I think that I see a pair of eyes coming from a deer. He swerved to avoid it. That moment was all it took. The impact itself shattered everything almost instantly, so now it's just raining glass. My name is Matthew Ream, and this is my story of how I beat the odds and survived my truck for six days after a crash. Here's Matt's story in his own words. This is Trapped After a Car Crash.

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3:42In December of 2023, Matt Ream enjoyed plenty about his life. Running, hanging out with his best friend Kristen, and welding.

3:51Matt Reum:He also liked a good steak. At 27 years old, I was in a fairly comfortable spot. I'd finally got myself in a position that I was happy with. I had a few great friends. I had a job that was fairly steady, that I could work as much or as little as I'd want to with finances to back that up. To help further his career, Matt had started an associates program in construction technology. He was set to graduate in the coming year, But that day in December 2023, Matt found himself doing some teaching in a Chicago suburb, about an hour from his home in South Bend. On December 20th, I had been out in Hobart, Indiana, practicing welding and helping some of the younger kids in the trade learn how to weld.

4:40Matt Reum:That evening, with it being around Christmas time, I decided to go by a mall to do some window shopping. After the mall, Matt grabbed a bite to eat and began to scroll through Facebook. A friend of his had died recently, and Matt felt bad about missing a public memorial service. And that's when I had noticed my friend's mom posting on Facebook saying that his funeral was going to be in Missouri that Friday. And I wanted to show my respects to him and his family as we had worked together on a few jobs over the last five years or so. And so I made the decision that I was going to drive from Hobart, Indiana to South Bend, pack up enough for a four or five day trip to Missouri and have proper funeral attire.

5:30Matt Reum:So at about nine o 'clock that night, I hopped in my truck and started driving to South Bend.

5:43Normally, Matt took a toll road home to South Bend. He knows the road like the back of his hand. But that night, he missed his exit and ended up driving his silver Dodge Ram down the I-8094.

5:56Matt Reum:It was a foggy night, and the amount of fog had made it to where I could only see about 200 feet in front of me, which isn't that far considering I'm still going highway speeds. After about a mile or so that's when I see a flash of something in the road and I think that I see a pair of eyes coming from a deer. I don't want to hit it but having lived in the south they always tell you hey don't swerve to miss deers or don't swerve to miss animals because it generally causes more problems than if you had just hit it square on. Knowing that, but knowing that I was trying to get down to Missouri for this funeral, I decided in a split second that I was going to swerve to miss this deer.

6:44Matt Reum:And so I swerve hard to the right, going over the shoulder and partially into the grassy hill on the side of the road. And as I go to jerk my car back onto the highway, I end up hitting the outside of the guardrail, which tears off my driver's side tire, tears the entire fender off, the entire bumper off. Everything is happening in slow-mo and there's something in the back of my head that says maybe I shouldn't have swerved, but it's not the first thing that's coming to my mind at the moment. The first thing is I need to somehow get my truck under control And I can feel the front of the truck shutter as everything's hit and crumpled and torn off.

7:33Matt Reum:And I can feel my truck lurching as it loses all the steering on the driver's side. I can feel the airbag as it's deploying. At the same time, my steering wheel's being pushed up into me. My right hand is being pushed out of the way and my left hand wasn't on the steering wheel. so it's just kind of flopping around at this point. The impact itself shattered everything almost instantly, so now it's just raining glass, and that's when things go black and I go unconscious.

8:12Matt's truck spins down a hill, hits a rocky patch, and rolls down through a creek. It comes to a stop in what's called the Rip Rap, those large rocks under a bridge. He's not quite sure how much time has passed.

8:27Matt Reum:Matt checks his watch. I know it's about 10.30 when I'm coming to, and I'm noticing that my body is just screaming between my left leg and my hand, and my entire body's hurting. Matt doesn't know it, but his left leg and his right hand are both broken. His legs are trapped, and he can't see his left leg. I can tell that something's pressing up against it, which after a little bit of investigating, I'm able to find out that my dash and my steering wheel had been pushed into my lap and then down onto my right thigh. So I'm not able to pull my leg straight up and try getting it out like that. And I'm noticing that there are pieces that feel like it's cutting into my shin on my right leg.

9:19Matt Reum:Matt realizes he's pinned inside his truck. For the first few minutes while I'm down there, my brain's processing everything. It's trying to figure out where I'm at, what is the situation I'm in. You know, did anybody see me? Did anybody hear it? His cell phone had been on the passenger seat before the crash, but it's not there now. Matt starts trying to attract attention, hoping that someone will hear him. It's the week before Christmas, so I imagine that some people are driving into Chicago or out of Chicago to go see family for the holidays. And so there's a sliver of hope in my mind that thinks that somebody saw me.

10:02Matt Reum:So I start yelling and I yell as loud as I can for as long as I can. Help, help, somebody come find me. I'm down here. And at the same time, I'm trying to hit my horn. I'm trying to restart my truck. I'm trying to hit the emergency 911 button, which isn't doing anything. I'm trying to call out for my phone. I'm not getting any results from that. Nothing is working. Not the horn, not the emergency call button, and Siri doesn't answer from his phone. All the while Matt's yelling, he can hear cars driving by. He doesn't know it, but there are two fire stations within five miles of him. In the distance, I can hear sirens, whether it's from a police car or an ambulance or a fire truck, I don't know.

10:51Matt Reum:But I could hear these fire trucks get loud and loud into where it sounded like they were on top of me, which they were. And then they would just start disappearing into the darkness that is now encompassing me. Matt yells for as long as an hour. At this point, my brain is so tired. My body is exhausted to the point where I end up going to sleep just because I'm hoping that I'll wake up and everything that's going on is just a dream and that I'm going to wake up, get everything, and then drive down to Missouri. And I wake up on the second day and I realize that it's not a dream. The next morning, Matt assesses his situation.

11:40It's winter in Indiana, and no one knows he's missing.

11:44Matt Reum:I wake up. My body is still screaming in pain. My right hand is throbbing. It's swollen. It's black and blue. It honestly doesn't look like my hand anymore. I'm covered in glass. My body's all cut up from the windows of my truck just being shattered, and all that glass had got thrown around. And I spend a good deal of time just trying to tidy up and trying to get myself as much room as possible, but also trying to potentially work myself out of my truck, thinking that maybe I can disassemble enough of everything to slide out somehow or pull off a door or something like that. And that's part of the construction workers mindset that I was having.

12:33Matt can't feel his foot on his left leg. He can feel excruciating pain in his right ankle. He can't see his legs to know if he's bleeding. So he works on staying calm and focuses on the situation at hand.

12:48Matt Reum:My brain is catching up on everything that I was thinking and everything that I had saw the night before, but maybe didn't have the mental strength to actually process. I wasn't afraid of the fact that I was stuck in my truck. There was still a kind of beacon of hope in my brain that was telling me, you know, somebody is going to stop on the highway and look down and see, hey, there's a truck down here, you know, maybe we should call 911. Matt's brain is also telling him that he can get himself out of this, even if he has to spend a day in his truck. He finds a notebook and jots down some goals, like find his cell phone and figure out how to charge it.

13:33He also makes a list of things within arm's reach.

13:37Matt Reum:I had a toolbox full of sockets and wrenches, and I had some chicken wings that were on the floorboard of my passenger seat. I had a duffel bag full of a couple pairs of clothes. But as Matt's taking inventory, one awful fact jumps out at him. The one thing that I didn't have that I knew that I was going to need very shortly was I did not have water.

14:16On December 22nd, his second full day trapped in his truck, Matt woke up before the sun. He hadn't had anything to drink in well over 24 hours, and his throat was parched. He could hear water in the creek, but he couldn't reach it.

14:32Matt Reum:I was still hopeful. I was still fairly optimistic about where I was at, about my own efforts to get myself out of my truck. But there was a part of my brain that kept saying, hey, you know, like, you're not going to get out of this. You might die down here. Matt tries to stay positive, but it's a struggle. Even under better circumstances, he's been no stranger to depression. It was a part of my brain that I kept trying to quiet down as much as possible because I didn't want to lose all hope. Because I knew that even though I was in a situation like this, after years of dealing with depression and anxiety and going to psychiatrists and therapists, Now I'm having to face my depression and anxiety without the help of any kind of medication, and I'm having to use everything that therapy has taught me over the last few years.

15:30One of the things Matt tries is deep breathing. In and out. Relax. But the sound of the creak seems like it's taunting him.

15:40Matt Reum:My mouth is dry, my throat's dry. It was getting to the point where I was becoming genuinely concerned about passing away due to dehydration. He thinks of ways he could get water and imagines a hack that involves tying cell phone charging cords and clothing together and casting them in the direction of the creek to try and soak up water. But what Matt really wants is to get himself out of his truck. So he decides to keep trying to pull off pieces of his dashboard with a Phillips screwdriver. It gives him something to focus on. He thinks how it's unseasonably warm for Indiana in December, maybe in the mid-40s.

16:22No snow. Then, to his surprise, Matt hears thunder, and it starts to rain.

16:28Matt Reum:Where my truck landed was directly under a drainage spout for the highway. All the water that was raining onto the highway and funneling into this drainage spout was falling directly onto my right shoulder, which was very uncomfortable. But uncomfortable or not, Matt quickly realizes that this might be the solution to his thirst. While I'm now getting completely soaked, I know that I've got a bottle of mouthwash that was empty. And so I try funneling this water using the sun visor, and I redirect all this water that's falling on top of me into a mouthwash bottle. And this water tastes horrible.

17:13Matt Reum:It's got a mixture of gasoline and diesel, and it's gritty from all the asphalt and everything from the roads, probably mixed with a little bit of glass. He searches around him for something he can use as a filter. I'm able to grab a pair of sweatpants that was in the duffel bag and soak up a lot of water and then kind of drink the water through the sweatpants as it's fairly saturated. And the water still tastes horrible, but it's not crunchy water. It raining was a huge relief to me because I knew that it would give me another couple days of living to where somebody could potentially find me.

17:55Sleeping is also a problem. At first, Matt has to sleep pretty much sitting up. Then he figures out how to put his duffel bag on the center console and nap on it.

18:06Matt Reum:That would work for a couple hours until I felt kind of the blood rush into my head, and then I'd have to go back to sleep sitting straight up. And that does lead to kind of a decline in my health and my own emotional and mental state of being, just knowing that my sleeping conditions weren't the best. Matt keeps trying to disassemble the dashboard to get the steering wheel off, but it isn't working. He's cold. His lower body is soaked from both the rain and also having to go to the bathroom where he sits. He worries about the urine infecting his wounds, and he begins to struggle with his thoughts.

18:45Matt Reum:Physically, I'm a mess. Emotionally, I'm going downhill very quickly. and every hour I'm down there, I'm constantly thinking, you're not going to make it, you're not going to make it, you're not going to make it. Matt's negative thoughts start to get the better of him. The charging cords that I was going to be using to try to throw in the creek to try to get water, I try essentially hanging myself or suffocating myself with those, and thankfully those break. Matt is extremely grateful that he fails. He returns to positive thinking because he really wants to live to see the people that he cares about, especially his best friend, Kristen.

19:29He shifts forward enough to reach out and grab a windshield wiper, which he snaps off. He uses it to try and grab a knife from the floor of his truck.

19:38Matt Reum:I'm hoping that I can reach this knife. I'm thinking that that's what I have to do to be able to get myself out of the truck, is amputate either one or both of my legs to get myself free. I get the blade of the knife in my fingertips and whether due to oil or water or whatever, it ends up slipping out of my grasp and underneath the passenger seat, which I know that I can't reach. Time starts to get hazy for Matt as day two turns into day three and then day four. I have a watch on and I'm able to know what time it is, but whether it's a.m. or p.m., that's starting to slip for me. And I'm starting to think that days are passing by a lot quicker than they are.

20:26Matt Reum:I think that by like noon of the fourth day, I'm thinking that it's, you know, midnight or noon of the fifth day. And so I start trying to write in the journal more, trying to keep a more detailed kind of running of what's going on in my head and some of the things I'm facing and some of the things that I'm dealing with. And it's constantly dark because it's either rainy or cloudy out and there's no sun out. And even when it's nighttime out, there's still the moon out. So it's still dark with some light. And during the day, it's still dark with some light. so it's hard for me to tell exactly whether it's a.m.

21:04Matt Reum:or p.m. On the fourth day, Matt wakes up to hear more traffic driving by above him, oblivious to the crash below. He can also hear squirrels chatter in the trees. He feels his body starting to atrophy because he hasn't moved in so long. He's run out of water, and he's desperately hungry. And while he's having trouble keeping track of days, he's pretty sure it's Christmas. I spend the majority of that time writing in my journal some of the regrets that I had in life that I wasn't able to do things, that I wasn't able to spend time with family that year, that, you know, this is a really shitty Christmas present for everybody to find.

21:50Matt Reum:and I'm starting to get a little bit more philosophical and get more thoughtful in the journal trying to say I'm sorry for not being able to make it and it would be nice to wish for, to get out of there for Christmas present but my brain knows that, you know, I am stuck in here. Matt goes to sleep that night after praying to God, any God, that someone will find him. But the next morning, nothing has changed. I'm still kind of in the same situation. I can't move. I can't get out. It had rained a little bit overnight, which I was thankful for, because now I've got a little bit of water. But I'm getting to the point where I don't think that I'm going to be making it that much longer.