A trucker seriously hurt after crashing into a rogue horse earlier this month is searching for the owner, who he says has an obligation to help him pay his massive medical bills.
The accident happened before dawn on April 4th near Lakeland, Florida, but 31-year-old trucker Christopher Fears is still recovering from the spine fracture, cut cornea, and face lacerations sustained in the incident.
According to The Ledger News, Fears was driving along State Road 33 with an oncoming semi truck approaching him in the opposite lane when a horse entered the road from a private driveway, stepping into the path of the second truck driver, 55-year-old Robert Billings. Billings was unable to avoid the horse and clipped it, sending it careening through Fears’ windshield, causing the rig to overturn.
The horse was killed and Fears was seriously injured in the accident. Billings was unhurt.
Fears says he remembers regaining consciousness inside his cab as he hung upside down, pinned by the steering wheel with blood running down his chest and back.
“I was trying to get out and kind of freaking out,” he said.
“It happened so quick, I originally thought that the truck coming the other way had blown a tire.”
Fears was then transported to a nearby hospital via helicopter, which is when the medical bills began piling up.
“We’re thankful — praise God — that he’s OK,” said Fears’ mother, Marilyn, explaining how the helicopter ride alone cost over $24,000, and the hospital stay somewhere around $55,000, not including the doctors’ bills and plastic surgery to salvage Fears’ seriously damaged face.
“We want the horse’s owner to be responsible for something,” she added.
Luckily, Fears is expected to make a full recovery, but in the meantime, he is out of a job and is worried about how he will afford his medical bills. Fears had just quit his previous trucking job to drive his father’s recently purchased semi truck, and thought he could do without health insurance for a while as the two built up their joint business venture.
“I’m out of a job and a source of income and this person [the owner of the horse] can still go to their job and make an income and still be fine,” he said.
The horse was described as brown with a pink halter, and a deputy investigating the incident says he has a lead on who the owner might be, but that the person in question has not been cooperating.