The delivery truck lurched into reverse before she could scoot out of the way. She heard the beeping, she heard the yelling, but Denise Giraldo said she couldn’t turn the handlebars of her motor scooter fast enough.
The truck backed over her.
For more than 20 minutes, Giraldo, a 19-year-old UF freshman, was pinned beneath the back end of a loaded Pepsi truck late Friday morning on Union Road just before its intersection with Buckman Drive.
Witnesses said the truck sounded like it was falling apart as it hit.
Others saw blood and feared the young woman wedged between the blue Yamaha scooter and the large truck had been killed.
She was alive but badly injured and rushed by ambulance to the Shands at UF Trauma Center.
Before the ambulance arrived, about 20 students and the truck driver tried in vain to free her.
Her pelvis was shattered, some of her internal organs were damaged and her right arm was broken. Caroline Camacho, Giraldo’s mother, said doctors predict she may be in the hospital for three months.
But the green-eyed brunette still smiled from her hospital bed Saturday. Surrounded by a bright garden of get-well plants, cards and balloons in her room on the 10th floor of Shands, Giraldo said the day before seemed like the “weirdest dream.”
But it wasn’t.
“I was awake the entire time,” she said.
Before the accident, Giraldo was on her way to the infirmary for a quick visit before taking her very last American history quiz.
She was almost there when she eased “Iona,” her motor scooter, to a stop behind a Pepsi delivery truck about two blocks away from the infirmary.
A charter bus stopped at the intersection, trying to turn onto Union Road from Buckman Drive. The driver of the Pepsi truck, Byron D. Byrd, 24, backed up to make room for the bus to pass. The truck started its usual “beep, beep, beep” as Byrd put the truck into reverse.
“It was so quick,” Giraldo said.
Pepsi officials have not released a statement because the accident is still under investigation, Pepsi spokeswoman Kelly McAndrew said.
At about 11:20 a.m., witnesses began to call 911. Others tried to help right away.
“A big crowd of students were trying to lift the truck off her before fire rescue got there,” said Allen Rout, a UF employee at the scene.
Students and other witnesses had formed a ring around the back end of the truck, trying to move the vehicle enough for Giraldo to escape, Rout said. But the truck was too heavy – it was loaded with hundreds of 20-ounce bottles of Pepsi products.
Susan Mickelberry, the coordinator for information and publication in the UF financial affairs office, was filming a video for UF Preview at Century Tower when she heard the accident. She and another co-worker “just started running,” she said. Mickelberry said she saw the truck driver begin hurling bottles from the back of the truck onto the sidewalk.
“My god, that could have saved her life,” she said.
Giraldo agrees.
“The amount of pressure that came off from them taking all those bottles out was incredible,” Giraldo said from her hospital bed Saturday.
During the ordeal, Mickelberry said, Giraldo kept her cool.
“I didn’t know why I was there,” Mickelberry said. “I was terrified. But I took her hand. I asked her name. She said, ‘Denise.’ Then she said to me very calmly, ‘I think I’m losing a lot of blood.’ I was so amazed how calm she was.”
On Saturday, Giraldo gave a reason for her calm: “Inner peace,” she said.
Giraldo even tried to single-handedly help herself. She raised her left arm to demonstrate.
“With this hand,” she said, “(I) was holding up the truck. I guess that was good because it provided stability.”
But Giraldo was still locked to the pavement as the sun moved directly over her.
“The sun at 12 o’clock was hitting me pretty good,” Giraldo said. “But then this paramedic guy stood in front of me, and that was pretty amazing.”
Gainesville Fire Rescue responded to the scene about 10 or 15 minutes after the accident, Mickelberry said. Once there, they raised the truck with special air bags and freed her within minutes, said Gainesville Fire Rescue spokesman Paul Kincaid.
As the firefighters slid Giraldo out from under the truck, the crowd of more than 50 onlookers cheered.
It was mid-afternoon Friday when Giraldo’s parents received a call from the University Police, and they drove from West Palm Beach.
“It was crazy – I thought she was dead,” Comacho said Saturday from her daughter’s bedside in Gainesville.
And on Saturday, family and friends surrounded the bedside where Giraldo was resting and keeping a sense of humor.
“The first thing she said to me was, ‘Don’t laugh at me,’ when she was coming out of ICU,” said UF student Mariana Gardinala, a friend of Giraldo.
