Jared Freitag, a Long Beach native and animator/illustrator, has mixed feelings about Christmas, but it’s safe to say he likes it more now than he did on Dec. 25, 2004, when a drunk driver collided with his vehicle head-on, nearly costing him his life.
Christmas morning had never been an eventful holiday for Freitag until that day. “I always thought Santa was supposed to come on Christmas morning,” jokes Freitag. “My mom, however, thought he arrived the day before, while we were all still at Christmas Eve service.”
Because his family had celebrated Christmas the night before, Freitag chose to spend the next morning with his girlfriend. He was on the road to meet her when his life took a violent turn for the worse.
“I came to, and everything was black. I remember feeling the oxygen leaving my lungs, and a man was holding a rag to my face,” recalls Freitag. Confused about what was going on, Freitag was given the rag to hold while onlookers tried to pull him from the vehicle. “That’s when I noticed there was blood pouring from my face. But I couldn’t feel a thing. I just remember the people screaming.”
Unable to even recall what day it was, Freitag sat immobile while civilians called the paramedics. It was then that Freitag first learned that he had just been hit by a drunk driver.
“He walked away from the scene,” Freitag remembers. “He didn’t even get jail time. He said he was in my lane because he sneezed.”
His car and body mutilated, Freitag was lifeflighted from the scene to a local hospital, where doctors rushed to repair not only his face, but also the third-degree lacerations on both his spleen and liver.
“You would think someone that went through that kind of thing would have some eye-opening epiphany,” Freitag says. But not so for him. “It could have gone either way, you know? It happened so quick; I had no say over whether I lived or died.
“If life can be over so quickly, why stress about whether you live or die?”
Freitag now spends his time living every day to the fullest, in the company of close friends. And he carries with him the scars of an impossible survival. // LOUIE HUESMANN
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