Fellow drivers recalled tree falling on I-5, how they helped save woman’s life

In the first moments after a tree fell on a red Toyota Prius on southbound I-5, fellow drivers were the ones who worked to save the woman’s life – long before first responders could get through the thick traffic.

PHOTOS: Tree falls onto car on I-5

Two of the witnesses told KIRO 7 what they saw and what they and others did so a woman wouldn’t die, trapped in her car.

Keith Conklin of Olympia was relaxing in the passenger seat of a white SUV when a tree suddenly fell on the female driver in the lane right next to him.

“I stared at her through her driver’s side window as the tree crushed her,” Conklin said, “and I looked at Kristen and I think I said something like, ‘She’s gone.’””

While Kirsten Conklin parked their car, her husband – a former paramedic, firefighter and sheriff’s deputy – ran toward the Prius.

“He was trying to get out of the vehicle before I was done moving, and I’m like, ‘You’re not going to cross I-5 traffic until I get over,’” Kirsten Conklin said.

“The lady was crushed in that seat with her head up on the ceiling.”

Multiple drivers who also stopped lifted the trees from the crushed car. Conklin and a man who identified himself as an ER nurse named Jim believed that the driver of the Prius, Mary Sabetto, would die if they didn’t get her out of her vehicle immediately.

They said Sabetto was turning blue, and her seatbelt was constricting her. Keith Conklin yelled for a knife to cut her seatbelt.

Sabetto suffered a broken rib and crushed spine. In an interview with KIRO 7 from her hospital bed she thanked the rescuers, but doesn’t remember the moments when the tree hit her.

She’s now in satisfactory condition at Harborview, which is where the Conklins had been right before they saw the tree fall. They were at the hospital saying goodbye to Keith’s cousin, 20-year old Kaylee Denithorne, who’d been in a car crash in Olympia on Easter Sunday. Kaylee died hours after Sabetto’s crash.

“God put us in the right position,” Keith Conklin said. “We said goodbye to her and helped, and I think Kaylee knows she helped us too.”