Man Trapped Under Car In Cambridge, After Parking Incident

CAMBRIDGE, MA —A man was taken to the hospital after an icy parking incident gone wrong in Harvard Square Wednesday, police said.

At 11:18 a.m. police and fire were called to 1168 Mass Ave. in Harvard Square for a report of a crash with a pedestrian trapped under the car, according to police.

What they found was a bit different.

The driver, a 29-year-old Malden man, in an apparent attempt to parallel park well, had a companion directing him. At some point, he opened the car door to check he was inside the painted lines with the car still on and in reverse and somehow pressed the gas instead of the brake, according to witnesses.

What happened next was quick: The car flew backward, the young woman directing him screamed as the car hit her and then slammed into meters nearly flattening them and then hitting a fence nearby. Upon impact, the driver was thrown from the car and then somehow slid under part of the tire.

"That tire was on the side of his stomach," said Joelle Morin, who was visiting Cambridge from Canada and was site-seeing when she happened to stop for a moment, just before the crash.

Morin said she heard the young woman scream and then saw the man under the tire. She directed people to call 911, and called herself, too, as she was trying to calm him and keep him conscious, talking to him in French and in English. She hung up when the young man started to try to crawl out from under the tire.

"Everyone was telling him not to move. 'Don't move, don't move, stay calm,'" Morin told Patch in a phone interview.

He managed to squeeze himself out, rolling his clothing up, exposing skin which appeared like it was also ripped off, according to witnesses. Morin said he was missing a shoe and was bleeding from his head and mouth. She said she sat next to the man on the sidewalk to reassure him in French as police arrived but stayed about 20 minutes in total waiting for the ambulance.

"I could tell they were from Haiti, and I really wanted to reassure them and keep him awake," said Morin who noted there is a large Haitian community in Montreal she recognized the accent.

A police spokesperson told Patch the man made it out from under the car without injury, but he was later taken to Brigham and Women's hospital for an evaluation.

"It may have only been 10 or 15 minutes, but it felt like forever," she said, noting another witness commented that it was taking a while for the ambulance to arrive.

But Morin said she's concerned his injuries were much more severe.

"I so hope that he's OK," she said. " I mean, he completely bent over flat the parking meter and would have gone through the fence had the meter not been there."

Police said Traffic and Parking officials came to the area to remove the damaged meters.

A police spokesperson told Patch two officers helped pull the man from the car and no citations were filed. Morin said police did not appear until after the man was out.

[Editor's note: This story has been updated to include what a witness saw]

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