A Manitoba man who nearly died last fall in a crash near Balmoral, Man., says he was saved when an area farmer happened upon the burning wreckage of his vehicle.
Colton Letkeman, 28, told Global Winnipeg that he was driving home from a social in late October when he swerved off a rural road to avoid hitting a deer at 80 km/h.
Letkeman, who was acting as a designated driver, had just dropped off a friend and was looking forward to getting home, only a mile-and-a-half away.
“There’s a lot of deer in this area…so of course, one pops out of the road… Once I noticed the deer in front of me, it was a two-second instant stop,” he said.
“I definitely didn’t want to hit something that’s just randomly in the road, so I swerved off to the right, unfortunately, which was my fatal error.”
His vehicle eventually crashed into a tree, he said, and the airbags didn’t deploy, leaving him unconscious for a short period, while the vehicle began to catch fire.
“When I did come back to, there wasn’t enough of a fire too much yet,” he said.
“So I had enough time to kind of collect myself and realize, OK, I’m still in the truck. What do I need? How do I do this? What’s happening?”
Letkeman was able to drag himself from his burning vehicle and made it to a nearby ditch — with two broken legs — in the middle of the night. He unsuccessfully attempted to crawl for more than half an hour to a nearby house, when suddenly a vehicle pulled up.
Thankfully a nearby farmer, Randy Van Wyk, who was out checking on his cattle, noticed the crash scene and saved Letkeman’s life, leading first responders to the crash site.
“While I’m in the hospital, I want to figure out who was it that came by and helped because what were the chances it was so late in the night? Where? Who’s coming by?
“I’m going to… die here because I’m stuck bleeding with two broken legs and no way to get help because I forgot my phone.”
The tree Colton Letkeman crashed into.
Submitted / Colton Letkeman
Letkeman’s mother, Bernice, said the family was holding an early Christmas event — because a number of them were planning on a holiday trip to Mexico — and that waiting for him to come home while not knowing what had happened to him was the scariest part of the whole situation for her.
“The worst. Any parent’s nightmare. It really was,” she said.
“Not knowing where he was and where he should be… and he never would miss a family event.
“When (the hospital) said, ‘he’s here’, and they put you on hold… but what’s happening with him? Is he alive?”
Although he was in and out of multiple life-saving surgeries, Letkeman said he knew he eventually wanted to meet Van Wyk and thank him for his help — and when they finally spoke, he learned the farmer had just decided to leave the house early that morning due to a gut feeling something was wrong.
“I don’t understand it, but I’m thankful for it,” he said.
Letkeman said he continues to rehabilitate from the crash — attending physiotherapy sessions in Stonewall three times a week — and is at the point now where he is now able to stand for short periods of time on his left leg.
“If it was just the one left leg with the injuries that I got, I would be fine and dandy by now. But because the right leg got so damaged (too), it definitely give me a tougher case,” he said.
“I’m standing now. At least that was an achievement since last week. The majority of my weight is standing on my left leg, but (I can stand) 10 or 20 seconds, basically enough just to kind of do something.”
The right leg, he said, was badly damaged, with multiple breaks as well as a severed tendon.
“I don’t really have much nerve feeling to it. So that’s been the awkward part of it — trying to learn how to reuse my leg entirely… because once you put weight on to it, you can feel the nerves trying to do something. They know something’s there, but it’s hitting the wall.
“It was definitely a weird thing to get used to, but I have, more or less.”
