Truck drivers save Palatine man from burning vehicle

What few memories Stephen Hamontree has of his crash are hazy until the moment when his SUV is on fire, he's pinned in the wreckage and a couple of truck drivers are trying to pull him through the passenger window before everything explodes.

"If it wasn't for those two guys, I'd definitely be crisp, burned up," Hamontree says Monday from the hospital bed set up in the family room of his home in Palatine, where he'll recuperate for the next three months.

The 24-year-old unemployed truck driver was on his way to Arlington Park to look for a job and maybe have a little fun on the Tuesday afternoon of June 9, when a speeding vehicle crossed three lanes of Route 53 traffic and clipped the front of Hamontree's SUV. The speeder kept going, but Hamontree's Chevy Trailblazer careened through a fence, shot over the frontage road and hit a tree.

"He was airborne. He took a ride," says Scott Laine, a veteran heavy equipment operator for Lenzini Excavating of Palatine, who was driving behind Hamontree. Laine pulled his truck to the side of the road.

"I jumped the fence and ran down there to help," Laine says.

The driver's door was crumpled and pinned shut, so the 57-year-old Laine squeezed his 6-foot-2, 220-pound frame between a fence and the passenger door.

"I was beating on the window and he was out (unconscious)," Laine says in the deep, gravely voice of someone used to tossing 100-pound chains around a noisy workplace. "It was filling up with smoke so I took a rock and broke out the window."

Hamontree, his right pelvis crushed and bleeding internally from a ruptured spleen, remembers hearing Laine yelling.

"I came to. I felt the heat. I started freaking out," Hamontree says, his eyes tearing at the memory of coming so close to dying. "I remember looking at the hood and seeing flames come up. The fire just made me panic. I tried to boost myself up and I couldn't."

Laine used his knife to cut away the seat belt.

"I crawled in there up to my waist. He was yelling, 'I don't want to die,'" Laine says. "The ground caught on fire around the car. He was screaming, 'I don't want to die! Get me out of here.' He was scared. I was scared. Everything was on fire."

Laine yanked Hamontree's torso out the window, but the severely injured man's feet got caught in the wreckage as other passers-by arrived on the scene.

"I yelled for a guy to help me. The (jerk) wouldn't help me," Laine recalls. "He said, 'The grass is on fire.' I said, 'No (kidding)! That's why I need help."

Picking up a load of garbage in the apartment complex, Waste Management driver Bob Jewell, 39, of Streamwood, heard the crash and immediately ran toward the chaos.

"The Waste Management guy ran into the freaking fire," Laine says of Jewell. "He didn't hesitate. He ran a good 200 yards or better. He's a good guy."

Together, Laine and Jewell pulled Hamontree from the flaming car.

"I remember being on the ground and hearing the pops of my car on fire," Hamontree says. "They (Laine and Jewell) started dragging me as I heard my tires pop."

Since he was in the process of using his vehicle to move back home, all of Hamontree's clothes, his laptop, even his baseball mitt perished in the fire. But thanks to Laine and Jewell, Hamontree did not. Appreciative loved ones called both men to thank them.

"I was talking to the Waste Management guy and breaking up a little bit," says Dean Hamontree, the grateful father.

"It certainly would have been a different Father's Day going to my grave," his son notes.

"We're very fortunate Scott was behind him," says step mom Kelly Hamontree.

"It ain't no big deal," says Laine, who didn't rush back to tell folks.

"None of us in the office had heard about it until the father called us," says Wendy Gold, office manager for Lenzini.

"We do a lot of safety stuff with our drivers. They're good guys," says Jewell's supervisor John Gerger, district manager for Waste Management. But running toward a burning car, "that's pretty brave," Gerger says.

A deeply indebted Hamontree looks forward to the day when he is healed enough to thank his rescuers in person.

"I've got a broken finger," Hamontree says. "So I can't shake their hands."