EVERETT — Teri Cantor left the crash scene strapped down in the back of an ambulance.
Bleeding heavily, she was whisked to one hospital and transferred to another. The Everett woman spent five days in an intensive care unit.
The other driver, Johnothon Bagley, departed in the back of a patrol car. Police believe he was impaired by drugs when the Pontiac he had borrowed crossed the center line of a residential stretch of road in Lowell and slammed head-on into Cantor’s Toyota.
Bagley, 27, fell asleep on the short ride to the police station. A ringing cellphone in his pocket didn’t rouse him from his slumber, according to a police report.
In a basement conference room, he nodded off again.
More than two months after their worlds collided, Cantor, 51, rolls around her second-floor south Everett apartment in a wheelchair. She’s recovering from multiple broken bones, including two shattered heels. Her feet are puffy and swollen and she must carefully tend to her wounds each day. She’ll have to wait another five weeks for doctors to let her know when she can walk again.
Bagley was arrested for investigation of vehicular assault. He posted $200,000 bail and for a while was out of jail. At the time of the crash, he was awaiting sentencing for several crimes that likely will send him to prison. Prosecutors later were able to convince a judge that Bagley had violated the conditions of his release, and his bail was revoked.
In a sense, both drivers are facing lengthy confinement.
Cantor has spent weeks at a time without leaving the tan walls inside her apartment.
Eight neatly sorted stacks of paper take up a portion of her living room floor. They include medical bills and insurance papers. The tab so far exceeds $350,000.
Cantor was within a few blocks of her job in the inventory and receiving department at the Acrowood manufacturing plant in Lowell when the crash occurred shortly before 8 a.m. Nov. 15.
It pains Cantor to know that police believe Bagley was impaired by drugs.
His eyes were bloodshot beneath droopy lids when he was first questioned. His speech was slow and slurred, according to police reports.
He’s not been charged in connection with the crash, so toxicology results haven’t been made public in court records.
Police obtained a judge’s permission to search the car he was driving. They found “miscellaneous drug paraphernalia” and “unknown miscellaneous suspected narcotics,” according to the search warrant.
Cantor wants people to consider the misery they can cause others when they drive impaired.
Her physical pain has been immense, but there also are emotional scars, she said.
“People need to be aware that this is the rest of the story,” she said. “It’s going to be an emotional thing for the rest of my life.”
