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Published on Saturday, November 29, 2003
in the Lakeland Ledger
Hit by two trucks and bounced in and out of a third, Trooper Richard Titus should have died on the side of Interstate 75 last summer.
A woman driving by thought so, pulled over and offered to pray for his soul as Titus passed into the next world.
But Mike Grim, an off-duty Lee County paramedic, had other ideas.
"Whenever I introduce him, I say `This guy saved my life,' " Titus said of Grim, a 33-year-old former Army Special Operations medic who happened to be driving to Venice that day on the interstate, rather than along his usual route on U.S. 41.
Minutes earlier, just before 1 p.m. Aug. 20, Titus, a 30-year-old former Marine, had pulled over a tractor-trailer for a routine Department of Transportation inspection.
Titus was standing in the emergency lane next to the truck when Apolinar Castillo Castro, 51, of Brownsville, Texas, drove up in his 1994 Ford pickup, which was towing a second truck.
When Castro tried to move from the right lane to the left and safely pass Titus, according to the FHP accident report, Castro lost control of the vehicles and swerved back into the right lane.
The right rear side of Castro's truck struck Titus, hurling him into the cab of the stopped tractor-trailer.
Titus bounced back and struck the right side of the truck being towed, then he ricocheted 10 feet in front of the tractor-trailer and landed on the roadside.
"I remember the whole thing," Titus said.
"I remember flying through the air. I was telling myself, `Don't hit your head, don't hit your head,' " Titus said.
He landed on his left side and couldn't move.
If he had not been wearing a bulletproof vest, which shielded his internal organs, Grim said, Titus almost certainly would have died.
"It tore him to pieces," said Grim. "Look at what happened to his arms and legs. He should have been dead at the scene."
"I remember being on the asphalt and it was hot," Titus said. "It was a hot day. People started arriving and stuff."
TREATED AT THE SCENE
Grim was stuck in the traffic backup on northbound I-75 when a state trooper blew by him at 60 mph in the median. Grim pulled in behind the trooper and followed him to the accident scene.
When he saw Titus, the trooper's right leg was bent sideways at the calf.
"The muscles contracted around the leg in such a manner that you could see inside the leg," Grim said. "They only stay that way until they get fatigued and then they bleed out."
Grim, who honed his medical skills when he was in the first Gulf War, was on his way to teach an advanced life-support class in Venice and so had all of his medical supplies with him.
For almost 20 minutes, until the ambulance arrived, Grim worked on Titus with the help of state troopers on the scene.
While dressing Titus' wounds, Grim noticed he had Marine Corps shorts underneath.
"I said, `Oh, you're a jarhead, huh?' " Grim said. "He said `Ooh Ra,' " the Marine battle cry.
Grim, trying to get Titus' mind working, started kidding his patient.
"Ooh Ra," the Marine repeated, edging back to coherence.
"We were jaw-jacking back and forth. I said I was with 10th Group, Special Operations as a PA for them -- he's like oh no, I've got an Army guy working on me."
The military banter kept Titus alert.
"That's what helped me on the scene," Titus said. "We were bickering back and forth, giving each other a hard time in a friendly manner, Army this, Marine Corps that.
"He said I had to go back and tell my Army buddies it's not true, all Marines aren't pansies," Grim said.
At first, Grim covered the other man's wounds with trauma dressings he had in the truck. But tight dressings, hampered by the nature of the fractured bones, were necessary to control the bleeding.
With Titus' arm and leg turning black from lack of blood -- the arm "looked like a wash rag," Grim said. "his hand was purpleblack" -- Grim learned that the Bayflite helicopter would be delayed.
He decided to set both fractures at the scene.
"As a paramedic, you don't do that," said Grim, "I know how to do it because of the military.
"This guy's probably one of the top five toughest people I've ever worked on -- he started laughing when I started pulling on his leg.
"He had all his buddies around him then, they kept pumping him up and he was laughing -- `That's all you got, that's all you got?' "
BONDED BY COINCIDENCE
After the rescue, Grim shied away from media inquiries. He downplays the role he played in saving his newfound friend.
"It's a bunch of funny coincidences," Grim said. "I normally don't carry that many trauma dressings -- I was going to teach a class or I would never have carried enough to stop the bleeding.
"I had six trauma dressings, IV fluids, splints, braces, you name it I had it there," he said. "That one day, that one particular day I had it in there."
Grim is quick to credit bystanders and FHP troopers on the scene with helping save Titus.
"I had everybody doing everything; it wasn't just me," he said. "Those officers could have said, `Hey, I don't have gloves, or no way, I'm not touching him.'
"The lady sitting with him, praying with him, a lot of things went his way," Grim said.
But most of all, said Grim, "God was there. I don't know if you believe in God or not but I tell you what, God was there for him."
The bond Titus and Grim developed while bickering back and forth grew stronger after the accident, when the two men discovered they live a few blocks away from each other in east North Port.
Grim used to run by Titus' house as part of his workout but didn't know who lived there.
He found out at 8:30 p.m., after the accident, when he called the dispatch center at Bayfront Medical Center to find out how Titus was.
Grim got to talk to Richard Titus' wife, Theresa, who had driven to the St. Petersburg hospital and just happened to be getting a tour of the dispatch center -- another "funny coincidence" -when he called.
"We talked for probably an hour on the phone while she was in dispatch," Grim said. Then they exchanged phone numbers.
After Titus was discharged from Bayfront in September, the two men chatted on the telephone every day for two weeks straight, discovering other coincidences. Grim's 2-year-old daughter, Hannah, shares a birthday with Titus, Oct. 30, for example.
Now he and Titus, who should be back on the job in about six months, get together socially. Their wives and children have become friends.
"He came to my little girl's birthday party; we just went out on the boat and we went to their house for a football party," Grim said.
"He loves to run, loves to go to the gym," he added. "I've got a buddy now -- good family and everything -- he's just a good guy.
"It's hard to find people like that who are good people."