A Massachusetts man is out of the hospital after being seriously injured when a tractor-trailer crashed and rolled over onto his car Wednesday on Interstate 495.
Chris Beausoleil has broken ribs, bruises all over his body and cuts to his hands, but he's happy he survived the crash in Littleton.
"I really thought I was done for," said Beausoleil. "I thought it was the end."
Beausoleil was driving on the highway when his Ford Focus and a tanker carrying heating oil collided.
"I flew away from him and I spun away into a ditch," he said. “And I remember thinking to myself, 'This is really crazy, but I think I'm OK, because I'm in a ditch and I'm away from all the traffic. There's no cars, I'm out of danger."
But the danger was just beginning.
"All of a sudden, the roof collapsed on me," Beausoleil recalled on Thursday. "And I was completely pinned down into the arm rest, I didn't realize how bad the situation was until I tried to move, I couldn't move anything."
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He had no idea the tanker had come crashing down onto his car as other drivers ran over to help.
"Everybody thought I was dead. Like, I could hear people talking about me," said Beausoleil. "They were all like, 'He's gone, I don't think he's going to make it.' I was telling them, like, 'no, no, I'm here still,' but it was freaky. I didn't think I was going to make it out of that."
Soon, firefighters arrived.
"They said, 'Do you realize what's going on?' And I'm like 'No, I just know the roof's on me.' They said, 'That truck is on top of you.' I was like, 'You're kidding me,'" he recalled. "They said, 'That roof isn't coming off for a while.'"
Firefighters worked feverishly to pull him out for over an hour, eventually removing enough of all the metal to free the 41-year-old and get him to the hospital.
At one point, he says he went into shock and started to panic. But then he came to.
"I am extremely relieved that he's not dead," his brother, Matthew Beausoleil, said Wednesday night. "I really feared the worst when I saw the wreckage."
He was released from the hospital several hours after being taken to the emergency room. He is expected to make a full recovery.
