One moment, two buddies were driving along Blackwater Road headed for a Saturday afternoon at the shooting range and the next they were combing the ditch for a missing woman.
Flagged down by a man on the roadside, with a mangled Corvette in the distance, Quinten Korneili and Chesediah Sterling jumped out and joined in a frantic search for the body flung from the vehicle just seconds before.
As the minutes ticked down, the three men moved closer to the car. In the distance, pieces of the hood and roof scattered along the roadside, and then the blue sports vehicle upright in the ditch. The driver stumbled out, incoherent and in shock. Rock music pumped loud from the stereo in the now-still Corvette.
That's when they noticed Angel Willard. Pinned under the driver's wheel, Willard's head and shoulders poked from underneath. In contrast to the red seeping from scratches on the driver and other passenger, her pale white face wasn't caked in blood.
Unconscious the 26-year-old was barely breathing as Sterling sunk to the ground, putting his level three first-aid training to work.
"She's basically just wheezing at that point," recalls Korneili, 21.
With no cell service, the three knew they had to act quick. The first man grabbed a jack-all from his car, and they careful eased the car off her chest two or three inches.
"All of a sudden you just hear Angel start taking breaths," says Korneili. He mimics the wheezing that he strained to hear; it's the sound of her breath he remembers most.
They knew not to pull her out for fear of internal injuries, but that little bit of space made all the difference. Then, they pulled the front tire off.
"That's when we could see her lower body a bit more," he says, as the smell of burnt flesh hung heavy in the air. "That did not look good. The one was definitely pinned under the exhaust and the other one was crumpled, her whole leg probably in a two-foot space."
A month-and-a-half later from her bed at Vancouver General Hospital, Willard speaks of the injuries as if reading from a list.
Hip broken.
Pelvis shattered.
Broken Femur.
Broken nose.
One eyeball was out of the socket and most devastatingly her left leg below the knee was burnt right to the bone by the car's exhaust.
"It's been very traumatic," says Willard, who was in coma for the first few days after the May 7 crash. "I've been on the verge of losing my leg."
The first attempt to save her leg didn't quite take and Willard recalls looking down as her foot turned black. Two weeks ago, she was sent to Vancouver for the second attempt and this week doctors confirmed the transplant, using flesh and muscle from her back and stomach, has worked.
"They've pretty much put me together like Humpty Dumpty," says Willard, after about a dozen separate surgeries.
Prince George has become a trauma centre for the north and a major referral centre, says one of her doctors, the plastic surgeon who helped save her foot. Patients like Willard - who Dr. Kristian Malpass wouldn't discuss specifically due to patient privacy - often require coordinating care for multiple serious injuries.
"Very complicated and complex injuries require a very careful approach to make sure the person has the best outcome," he said.
A fourth-degree burn like hers exposes deeper structures and is missing a strong blood supply - like ligament, tendons or bone.
"There is little you can do other than quite a drastic procedure," he said, so surgeons must use tissue that brings in its own blood supply, called a flap.
"A flap that's brought from a long distance away and plugged into blood vessels into the area, almost like plugging in a hair dryer. You take it from one place, transport to another area."
A limb-threatening burn like Willard's is not that common, said Malpass, "but in the case of an extremity, there's not a lot of tissue between the outside world and bone. It doesn't take much to burn through a very thin covering of skin and fat before you're down to bone."
Willard learned the stories of her accident in pieces, from messages with Korneili on Facebook and after another elderly gentleman visited her in Prince George hospital before she was transported south.
That man told her how a group of bystanders propped the car up and held it there for almost half an hour waiting for the ambulance to arrive. He didn't leave his last name but he left a rose floating in a cup of water by her bedside.
"He is a hero in my books and so are these two young men," she says of Sterling and Korneili. Doctors said their actions saved her life. "I wouldn't be here."
"We weren't being heroes, we were just driving," says Korneili, but he acknowledges they were lucky with the group on the side of the road that day. Quick thinkers, calm, equipped with good tools and the first aid to keep her alive in the crucial immediate aftermath.
Willard said she wasn't thinking that afternoon when she got in the two-person Corvette, sat on the passenger's lap as the other two were buckled in.
"I was being stupid and I went in anyway," she says. "It's totally my mistake for getting in but we were just going down the back road and I didn't expect him to go 180."
The Corvette careened down the road near the West Lake turn-off at speeds of 150 to 180 kilometres an hour, she says, and it was fishtailing. Like a blur, she remembers the moments before it flipped. And then nothing.
In the aftermath, the blue Corvette was propped up on blocks of wood, its mangled front high off the grass and a gaping space where the wheel once was.
Prince George RCMP said the accident is still under investigation. Accident notes record the call coming in at 12:12 p.m., describe the vehicle as "heavily damaged" and Willard showing "serious injuries." All three were taken to the hospital.
"They'll wait for the traffic analyst report and other reports to come in and from there then it could go to charges," said Cpl. Craig Douglass.
"It's under investigation and where the evidence leads us is where we'll go."
Willard hasn't spoken to either of the men since the accident, though she says they've tried to get in touch.
"I want nothing to do with any of them. I'm so lucky to be alive."
Recovery has been hard - an emotional rollercoaster - and Willard's on depression pills to ease her moods. In the days after, she suffered recurring nightmares that woke her, gasping for air.
In the last month she's undergone about a dozen surgeries.
Her eye is fine, "like it didn't happen," but it will take many, many months for her to get better and walk again.
Being apart from her four-year-old daughter has been the hardest part, though her ex surprised her this week with a visit. She remembers the accident as the day before Mother's Day.
Willard's mother has been by her side the whole way, staying with her in Vancouver.
The long days in the hospital have given her time to think and be grateful for the people who held the car safely off her body and the doctors who saved her life and leg. This week, when her foot was officially saved, has been a turning point.
"I know it's changed my life and it's made me feel like a second life to live," says Willard, adding the prayer has helped her heal. "God's given me a second chance. I'm going to do that and I'm going to live my life to the fullest."
