A push on a wrong pedal and six seconds were all it took for an SUV to run over Shawn Roll and drastically alter the Wisconsin man's life.
"I remember touching the front bumper and was like, 'Oh, this is happening,' and then I remember getting up off the ground," Roll recalled.
On his Facebook profile, Roll shared surveillance video of the incident from the Scrub-A-Dub on West Locust Street in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He can be seen standing at the garage door in front of the SUV when the vehicle's driver hit the gas while waiting for an oil change and barrels through the door with Roll stuck in between.
Roll, who works at Scrub-A-Dub, tried to get up to walk away, but fell back to the pavement. During an interview Friday, Roll said, at first he thought he wasn't seriously injured.
"The second I looked down and I saw blood all over the ground, and I saw my friend was holding his shirt onto my arm to hold the blood in and try and stop the bleeding a little bit. That's when I was like, 'Oh yeah, this might be bad.'"
Roll said that on the way to the hospital, he could only wonder if he would ever see his daughter again.
"The whole time, I asked them 20 times, I was probably really annoying. That's all I was really worried about," he said, adding his first-born child, Nora, had only been born a month earlier.
Roll posted images of some of his injuries. He said he was treated for a broken back and knee, an arm that had a cut down to the bone, a deep hole in his stomach which had to heal on its own and staples in his head.
The incident happened Oct. 29, 2017, but Roll was only able to publish the video publicly this week since he was able to settle a lawsuit out of court.
"It's so crazy that -- you see all those crazy videos on the internet -- you might as well post it out there and part of it is 'Please pay attention' when you're driving," Roll said when asked why he would want to publish the video of such a traumatic event.
He said the driver mistakenly hit the gas instead of the brake.
He said money was not what mattered in his case. He is just happy he's still here to have a story to share.
"I definitely don't take anything for granted, you know, every day is a blessing, especially any day I get to spend with my daughter; it changed me in that way," he said,"Even the boring days, I'm lucky to be here."
Roll still works at Scrub-A-Dub, but in a different area that is less risky.
This story, by Derrick Rose, first appeared with video on wisn.com
