Senior Jason Cox crashed and totaled his Chevy S10 Blazer on Sunday, Jan. 20, when driving up The Pass.

The crash occurred around 11:30 p.m. when Cox was speeding up the pass alone after bowling with a couple of his friends.

According to Cox, he was going 55 mph, 10 over the speed limit, when he saw a drunk-driving accident in front of him after going around a turn.

Cox saw the flashing lights from the emergency vehicles and reacted by hitting his brakes but spun out on loose gravel.

“As I was trying to correct, I started swerving toward the guardrail, overcorrected again, and ended up going head on into the rocks,” said Cox.

He was relatively unscathed from the crash, despite the fact that the front end of the car was demolished.

“Before the crash it was just terrifying. I just saw the rock wall, and I don’t even really know what happened. I passed out form shock after the airbags hit me and, next thing I know, because there was an accident in front of me, there was already a firefighter at my window asking me if I was okay,” said Cox. “I got whiplash and my glasses shattered.”

He did add, though, that the airbags going off “hurt a lot.”

Cox described, in detail, the extent of the damage to the car after the high-speed crash.

“The car is totaled: the frame is bent, my driver’s side window is shattered, my passenger door is jammed, my license plate is up under my car, all of my antifreeze and radiator fluid was all over the ground, and both my front tires are flat.”

Cox now has to go to court to attempt to reduce his four-point ticket and pay $169 for careless driving and speeding.

“My brother’s going to be driving me quite a bit,” said Cox.

Cox and his brother Cameron typically had shared two cars, a Land Rover and the Blazer that was crashed.

“What I regret most is speeding. If I wasn’t speeding, I wouldn’t have crashed,” said Cox.

There was nobody in the car with him, but Cox thinks that a passenger in the shotgun seat would have died in the crash.

By Keegan Bockhorst