'I'm lucky to be alive': White Sox fan describes harrowing hit-and-run at Guaranteed Rate Field

Just like he does 20-25 times a season, Chuck Janczy headed down Tuesday night to Guaranteed Rate Field to catch a White Sox game.

The 64-year-old Evanston resident remembers patiently waiting to cross 35th Street, make the familiar walk to his seat in Section 109 and watch the Sox play the Texas Rangers.

After that, it's a little fuzzy.

"I never saw the car," Janczy said Thursday in a phone interview from the University of Chicago Medical Center. "It came out of nowhere."

Along with three other people, Janczy was struck by a vehicle driven by Condelarious Garcia, 20, of Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood, prosecutors said. Garcia was arrested and charged with four felony counts of failure to report an accident with injury and four counts of aggravated reckless driving causing bodily harm. Bail was set at $200,000 on Tuesday night ahead of a June 30 court date.

In a chaotic scene outside Guaranteed Rate Field, three of the pedestrians hit by the car were treated on the street.

Janczy, on the other hand, went for a frightening ride he is still trying to piece together.

"I do remember, like, falling into the sunroof," Janczy said. "How the hell exactly that happened, I don't know. It's kind of morbid to think about it, but if you hit some crash dummy doll 100 times, what is the likelihood that one of them would fall into the sunroof? I think it would have to be pretty low."

Since he never saw the car coming, Janczy doesn't recall all the details.

"I was up in the air," he said. "I don't remember being up in the air, but I had to have been up in the air. I must have slid on the hood and the windshield and somehow fallen into the sunroof.

"I don't know if the guy hit somebody else or he had to slow down for a minute so maybe the momentum kind of allowed me to fall in. I don't know. It all happened all so fast that I don't really ... I never was really observing anything at that point."

The impact of the hit-and-run crash left Janczy with "a bunch of fractures." Before he was released from the hospital Thursday, he was treated for seven cracked ribs, "some small fractures in my spine" and a spiral shin fracture.

"I'm lucky to be alive," Janczy said.

That's putting it mildly.

For as harrowing as the incident was, Janczy unwittingly took a frightening ride he won't soon forget.

After falling into the car through the sunroof - he was upside-down - Garcia sped off down 35th Street and merged on to the Dan Ryan Expressway, prosecutors said.

"They took off because the police were chasing them," Janczy said. "I'm hanging upside-down in the car and I'm not sure if my legs were hanging out or not. They must have been. That's all I can think of, but I'm not 100% sure of that. Kind of."

In addition to Garcia, three other passengers were in the car.

"I saw a little bit of them and I heard them talking a little bit," Janczy said. "I was wearing sandals and I lost one of the sandals during all this. I don't know if it flew off from the car or if it was in the car. I also lost my cellphone; it fell out in the car. The CPD had it and my daughter went to get it last night."

As if all this isn't nightmarish enough, here's what happened when police finally stopped the car near 47th Street.

"I was still hanging upside-down," Janczy said. "At first it was a little scary, because they came out and they've got assault rifles or whatever and they're pointing guns, and they're pointing them at me. They're like, 'Get of the car! Put your hands up!' One of the other cops said, 'No, no, no, he's a victim!'"

"The whole thing took, it seemed like seconds. It was longer than that, but it seemed like everything happened so fast. I must have climbed down myself, but I don't really remember. I remember the cops were like, 'Get out of the car!' and I'm sure I scrambled to get out of the car because I was afraid."

As he waited to be released from the hospital Thursday, Janczy was understandably still trying to process everything that happened two nights earlier.

But when asked if he'd going back to Guaranteed Rate Field for more White Sox baseball this season, he said: "Oh yeah. As long as I'm able to, I'll definitely go back.

"As of right now, I'm fine," said Janczy, who works for IBM. "Maybe it takes time for trauma to sink in or something. It's just kind of like I'm feeling lucky that everything worked out the way it did. Maybe if I didn't fall into the sunroof, I would have gotten more injured. Maybe I would have slammed my head on the concrete or something.

"I have some pain, but it's not bad. Mostly, I'm just sore."