Texas man takes action to stop 94-year-old driver on the wrong side of the road

Thomas Prado will never know how many lives he saved one August day under a blue summer sky in west-central Texas.

But he knows one of them is a white-haired, 94-year-old woman who sits on a cushion to see over the steering wheel and listens to country music.

Prado, who lives in Lubbock, Texas, was driving through Stamford, Texas on August 22 when he and an 18-wheeler had to swerve out of the way of “this 94yr old women coming towards traffic on the highway,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

The woman in the pink blouse driving a white sedan was on the wrong side of the road.

“I drive 537 miles a day so I see many wild things on the road but absolutely nothing this terrifying!” Prado wrote to his Facebook followers.

Prado made a quick decision: Stop her before she hits someone.

He recorded the next few adrenaline-fueled moments of panicked yelling and tricky driving and posted the bites of video on Facebook where they’ve racked up more than 170,000 views collectively.

“Please excuse language!” he wrote in warning.

“I’m thinking in my head, you know, don’t let today be her last day. She doesn’t know,” Prado told KLBK in Lubbock, which identified him as a professional driver.

He acknowledged that maybe he didn’t follow traffic laws, either - probably not “the safest nor smartest” driving, he wrote on Facebook - as he himself moved onto the wrong side a couple of times to catch up to the woman.

“Personally if I was to get hit in that bigger transit van that I was in, it could possibly ... not necessarily save her, but I could take more of a hit than probably she could, you know,” he told the TV station.

“And that was going through my head, is I’d rather get hurt than see this woman ... you know, I don’t know who is at home or anything like that.”

She could have become part of a statistic like this: 6,764 people who were 65 and older died in traffic crashes in 2016, accounting for 18 percent of all traffic fatalities that year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Because America is getting older - the number of people 65 and older increased by 30 percent between 2007 and 2016 - the agency is “dedicated more than ever to promoting safe behaviors of older drivers on our nation’s roads,” it says on its website.

Prado’s first reaction when he came-to-face with this particular older driver was not printable in a family-friendly format.

The drama unfolds in his Facebook videos.

“No f***in way. No f***in way!” he yells after she nearly hits him.

He turns his van around and, heading in the wrong direction himself, drives a few yards to a spot where he can safely cross over onto the other side of the road, his video shows.

Now heading in the same direction as the sedan - she’s still on the wrong side of the highway - he accelerates and yells.

“No f***in way. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

He watches as the woman comes within feet of colliding with another car.

“Hey no, s**t!”

He speeds up and pulls into another turn-around spot. He appears to lean out the window and waves at the sedan, now approaching him.

“Hey, stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!”

But the car doesn’t.

“Damn it!”

He turns the van around and races again down the right side of the road, watching as the sedan whizzes dangerously past two more vehicles, including a big rig.

“F***. Stop!”

He speeds up and steers onto the grassy median. The van shakes. The camera shakes. Now he, like the sedan, is on the wrong side of the road but manages to get ahead of the car.

From near the side of the road he frantically waves his arm out the window toward the driver, yelling at her to stop.

He’s still yelling as she pulls alongside him.

“Stop!”

She hits the brakes and the car jerks to a stop, facing the wrong way in the highway’s passing lane.

“Hey, you’re going the wrong way,” Prado yells out the window.

The passenger’s side window of the sedan rolls down and Prado gets his first close-up glimpse of the tiny woman who nearly hit him.

“OK, here. I can help you,” he yells over the sound of traffic whizzing by. “Just wait, wait one second, OK. You’re gonna get hit. There’s cars coming 75 miles an hour.”

He backs up the van so he’s parked behind her, gets out and walks up to the car.

The woman opens her door. Country music is playing on the radio. She’s sitting on top of a red cushion. She tries to get out but forgets to unhook her seat belt. Prado reaches over to undo it for her.

“Here, I’ll help you to your passenger side, OK? Is there somebody I can call?” he asks as he helps her out of the car.

She says, weakly, no.

When she gets out, she can’t stand on her own. Prado takes her arm.

By this time, Prado wrote on Facebook, some power company workers have pulled up to help..

The woman said she had to be at her appointment by 8 a.m.

He told her it was 9 a.m.

When he asked if he could call someone for her, she told him, “I have a cat.”

This story was originally published August 28, 2018 at 5:14 PM.