Larry Nelson spilled his Dr Pepper on the way home from work one afternoon.
He pulled into a parking lot in Gladewater to clean up the mess, but the bottle cap had fallen to the floorboard, rolling just out of reach. He squeezed his wide, 280-pound frame between the seat and the dash and reached for the missing cap — and realized he was stuck.
Without knowing it, Nelson had mashed the button on his car seat that adjusts the driver’s leg room. When he did, it triggered a forward motion that pinned him to the floor.
“It felt like quicksand because the more I struggled the tighter the seat got,” he said.
Nelson was stuck there — in the parking lot of a local funeral home — for three hours. A brick wall hid him from passing drivers, and the funeral home employees didn’t notice him either. The running motor and radio drowned out his cries for help.
It was summertime, and hot. After two hours, the engine of his Pontiac Bonneville locked and quit. His left arm went numb. Then his muscles knotted up. The seat buttons dug through his skin, and the brake pedal rubbed his shoulder bleeding and raw.
At 5 p.m., the funeral employees went home. Nelson was becoming delusional. He thought about his four children, the youngest 3 years old and the oldest a Marine stationed in North Carolina.
“I did a lot of soul searching,” he said. “Three hours is a long time to think about dying.”
The Dr Pepper was just out of reach. Nelson tried to rip the seat out, and, failing that, he tried to break his ribs so he could slide away. Then he gave up. He resigned himself to his fate.
By chance, help arrived around an hour later when a family from Kilgore saw the car and thought it belonged to a friend of theirs. James Darden, his girlfriend Gaylia Smith and their two kids circled around and saw Nelson drooping from the vehicle.
“It was sitting in the middle of an empty parking lot and there were some feet hanging out that weren’t moving a whole lot,” Darden said. “It just didn’t look natural, and it looked like they needed some help.”
Darden couldn’t reach the buttons either, so he crawled into the car, climbed over Nelson’s body, and reached underneath him. After much maneuvering, Darden finally hit the seat button. Nelson was released.
“I just slithered out and sat on the ground,” Nelson said.
Darden helped him to a shade tree. Smith ran off to find Gatorade, and the couple’s daughter, 10-year-old Skyelar, kept a wet rag on Nelson’s neck. Their son, 11-year-old Zachary, massaged his arm, which had suffered muscle and nerve damage. When Darden couldn’t get the car to start, he drove the injured man to his house in East Mountain.
“I guess he decided they weren’t going to leave me there,” Nelson said. “He had a flatbed pickup truck, so he laid me up in the bed and drove me home.”
Nelson fell into his kids’ plastic swimming pool and lay there. In addition to the injured arm, he had suffered muscle damage in his back, and his kidneys nearly failed from dehydration.
After a while, Nelson’s wife called an ambulance to take him to the hospital. He was so disoriented and his speech so slurred the nurses thought he was drunk.
“How much did you have to drink?” Nelson recalls them asking.
“About two gallons,” he replied. He meant two gallons of Gatorade, but the medical staff wasn’t convinced. They spent the rest of the night asking him if he had been drinking.
Nelson was still groggy days after being released from the hospital. Standing in his front yard beside the plastic pool, he lifted his T-shirt to reveal puncture wounds where the buttons had dug into his skin. He rolled up his jeans to show huge yellow scabs over both of his knees.
His one regret, he said, is that he never got to thank Darden, Smith and their two children for saving his life.
“I was delusional when they pulled me out of there,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking right, for sure.”
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