NJ Governor Injured
The following story has been in the news these past couple days in the Tri-State area. Thoughts and prayers go out to Mr. Corzine. Reposted from the New York Times.
New Jersey Governor Is Injured in Car Crash
CAMDEN, N.J., April 12 — Gov. Jon S. Corzine underwent surgery on Thursday night after a car accident in which he broke his left leg, sternum, collarbone, six ribs on each side and a lower vertebra, state police and other government officials said. He was in critical but stable condition at midnight, sedated and on a breathing tube.
Mr. Corzine was in the front passenger seat when his state police vehicle swerved to avoid an apparently out-of-control driver on the Garden State Parkway and hit a guardrail. He was flown by helicopter to Cooper University Hospital in Camden, where he received seven units of blood and a metal rod in his leg during a two-hour operation that ended about 11:30 p.m.
“He has what we call multisystemic injuries,” Robert F. Ostrum, Cooper’s director of orthopedic trauma, who led the surgical team, said in a midnight briefing for reporters here. “Injuries to his chest, lungs, to his legs, and he lost a significant amount of blood.” Asked whether Mr. Corzine was lucky to be alive, Dr. Ostrum said: “Yes.”
Mr. Corzine is scheduled for two more operations, Saturday and Monday, to clean up the wounds, Dr. Ostrum said, adding that it would be “days to weeks” until he was lucid enough to conduct state business, and three to six months before he could get around fairly well. Though the governor sustained a cut on his forehead, Dr. Ostrum said a CAT scan showed no brain injury.
Richard J. Codey, the State Senate president and a Democrat like Mr. Corzine, stepped in as acting governor during the surgery, and is expected to remain in charge as long as Mr. Corzine is hospitalized.
The state trooper who was driving the Chevrolet Tahoe that was carrying Mr. Corzine was flown separately to Cooper, and asked that no information about his condition be released. Samantha Gordon, an assistant to the governor who often travels with him, was also hurt in the accident but walked into the Camden hospital unassisted shortly before 8 p.m.
After delivering a speech to the New Jersey Conference of Mayors at the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, Mr. Corzine was on his way to Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton, for a meeting between the Rutgers women’s basketball team and Don Imus, the talk-show host who was fired on Thursday for making a racist and sexist remark about the players.
In a 9 p.m. news conference at the hospital here, Col. Joseph R. Fuentes, superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, said that a red pickup truck entered the highway “erratically from the shoulder,” causing a white Dodge Ram pickup truck to swerve left. The governor’s driver, State Trooper Robert Rasinski, swerved to avoid the white truck, but hit it, and then slid into the guardrail, with the impact on the passenger side.
Colonel Fuentes said neither weather nor speed appeared to be a factor. He said Trooper Rasinski did “an excellent job handling the situation, considering that a car swerved into his path.”
The driver of the white truck stopped, he said, but the red truck did not, adding that state police will be examining cameras on the highway in hopes of identifying the red truck.
Governor Corzine was traveling, as he normally does, in a two-car caravan. Officials said the two troopers in the car following Mr. Corzine stopped to care for him rather than chase the red truck.
Mr. Fuentes said he was unsure whether Mr. Corzine was wearing a seatbelt; he often does not.
James Freund, a volunteer emergency medical technician, said he happened upon the scene and saw Governor Corzine, his glasses off, pulled from the car head first on an board used to immobilize the spine. “The only thing you could verbally hear from him was that he was moaning,” Mr. Freund said. “It looked like the car made a direct impact on the left guard rail and kind of hopped over it.”
Mr. Freund said that he saw the injured trooper give the thumbs-up sign to a fellow trooper, and that a swarm of firefighters and some 30 law enforcement officers, “looking like C.I.A. agents, dressed in black, with earpieces coming out,” surrounded the scene. He said the helicopter arrived at 6:25 p.m.
“It was obviously someone important,” he added. “I was assuming there was a fatality.”
New Jersey faces a $2 billion budget deficit that Mr. Corzine must close by July 1, and questions have been raised about the fiscal and legal soundness of the state’s accounting of its troubled pension system. He has been criticized by Republicans and others for failing to disclose the extent of his financial gifts to a former companion who is also the head of the state’s largest union. And all of this is taking place at a time when federal prosecutors have subpoenaed records from the governor’s office, and legislative offices, as part of a broad inquiry into Trenton’s often-murky budgetary practices.
More immediately, he was scheduled to leave Saturday for a five-day trade mission to Israel, his second international trip since becoming governor last year.
Dr. Ostrum, the surgeon, said the governor’s most severe injury was an open femur fracture, in two places, that pierced the skin. Surgeons used the longest rod and longest screws they had to repair the bone, and it still was not quite long enough for the 6-foot-3 governor. “Governor Corzine has a very long leg,” he said. “He’s got a significant rehab ahead of him,” he added,” but “there is no risk that he will lose his leg.”
Despite the seriousness of the injuries, Mr. Corzine’s pulse and blood pressure remained stable, Dr. Ostrum said, adding that he was lucid and talking to doctors when he arrived at the hospital. The doctor described the broken vertebra as “a nothing fracture,” and said he would give the governor a sling “for comfort” to heal the collarbone. The broken ribs and sternum were what necessitated the breathing tube.
The accident occurred at Mile Marker 44.5 in Galloway Township on the parkway’s northbound lanes, about five miles north of the Atlantic City Expressway. At Drumthwacket, the Rutgers team, which made it to the N.C.A.A. championship game but lost to Tennessee, arrived at 7:45 p.m. expecting to see the governor. Mr. Imus had arrived earlier by limousine. Half a dozen news reporters and photographers waited outside, and a news helicopter flew overhead.
They spent three hours in Drumthwacket’s library, departing shortly before 11 p.m., without commenting on their meeting.
No comments:
Post a Comment