Positivity: 21 Year-Old Credits His Being Alive to Seat Belt

Brendan Jaffe of Portsmouth, Maine Massachusetts (corrected — see Brendan’s comment below) rolled over six times — and he survived:

8-14-2006
A living case for seat belts

PORTSMOUTH — A minor concussion and a few scrapes and bumps were the only injuries Brendan Jaffe suffered after he lost control of his car and it rolled over six times across Interstate 95 last month.

Was it good luck? Divine intervention that saved his life?

No, says the 21-year-old, it was his seat belt.

“I didn’t break a single bone in my body. All I had was a bump on my head and a scratch on my arm,” Jaffe said Friday as he recalled the accident.

“People will ask me what happened to your arm and I’ll tell them the story,” he continued. “I’ll tell them, Make sure you wear those seat belts; I’m proof that they work.’”

Jaffe was driving his 1998 Volkswagen Jetta from York Beach, Maine, to work in Taunton, Mass., on the afternoon of July 21.

He was in the left lane near Seabrook when a truck in front of him quickly changed lanes, revealing a large trash barrel in the middle of the road.

“I swerved to avoid it and I remember feeling the back of my car swerve left and right, and then I went into the grassy median and just started rolling,” he said.

Jaffe said his car rolled over about six times before landing upright across the median near the northbound lane. He scraped both arms along the road when they went out an open window and sunroof and hit his face on the seat-belt post above his shoulder.

For some reason, the airbags in his car never opened, he said.

“If I hadn’t been wearing a seat belt, I could have gone anywhere. I could have gone through the windshield, out the sunroof, who knows,” Jaffe said.

Some Good Samaritans stopped and helped Jaffe out of his car and extinguished the fire that started in his engine. Paramedics transported him to Exeter Hospital, and he was released later that day.

“The nurses at the hospital said I was very lucky, that it could have been a whole lot worse,” he said.

Jaffe credited his parents with “always drilling it into my head” to wear a seat belt. Other people are now taking that advice after seeing pictures of Jaffe’s crumpled car.