'A miracle': Crash survivor Matt Reum, rescuers who found him after 6 days share story

Matt Reum woke up trapped in his mangled truck in a ditch beneath the interstate.

Once he came to, he pieced together what had happened the night before. The South Bend resident had swerved to miss what looked like a deer and rammed his truck into a guardrail. The impact sent his vehicle careening off the road to its nearly hidden resting place, near a small but rushing creek under a bridge. The truck's crumpled dashboard pinned him in place. The steering wheel jammed into his thighs.

Reum began yelling as loud as he could.

No one could hear him, but not because no one was nearby. Just overhead, Reum heard cars and semi-trucks and siren-blaring first responders speeding by on Interstate 94, the sprawling highway that wraps around the Great Lakes.

On average, traffic data shows, more than 60,000 drivers a day cross Salt Creek on I-94, where Reum crashed the night of Dec. 20. Their collective din drowned out Reum’s increasingly hoarse shouting. No one could see his crushed silver Ram truck from the road, either.

Over the course of six days, Reum, who's 27, sat alone and considered his fate as hundreds of thousands of vehicles roared by above him. Now lauded worldwide as a miraculous display of his will to live, those six days were a foggy haze of exhaustion and despair, he told The Tribune in a sit-down interview in February.

The force of the crash had knocked his phone to some unreachable spot in the passenger’s side footwell, so he couldn't call for help.

He once felt a surge of hope as his fingertips grasped a paring knife. He thought he could use it to cut the dashboard — or, in a gory vision, his own legs — to free himself. He was crestfallen when the tool slipped from his hold and fell out of reach.

More than once, he said, he tried to take his own life. He wrote a brief obituary in the form of a letter to his best friend.

But his car landed so that rainwater dripped down from the interstate onto his sunroof. He opened the hatch and funneled the water toward him. Finding he couldn’t stomach the foul mixture that poured directly from the road, he soaked up the liquid in a pair of sweatpants. Whatever moisture he sucked out tasted more like water.

As days blended with nights, Reum yelled and nodded off, yelled and nodded off. He thought about his regrets, his good deeds, his unfulfilled longings.

“The last day I was down there, my thought process went to absolute s***, mental-health wise,” Reum said. “Basically I wrote my obituary, last will and testaments, and also goodbye and suicide letters to some of my friends and family.”

He was dozing on the afternoon of Dec. 26, when two men out for a walk to scout a fishing hole caught a glint of fading sunlight from a silver Ram truck.

'Are you real?'

Telling the story, Mario Garcia is struck by the countless ways in which he may never have stumbled upon Reum.

Garcia, 60, and his 32-year-old son-in-law Nivardo De La Torre wanted to get outside on an unseasonably warm day after Christmas. Their wives were off at a gathering with the kids.

Garcia, a landscape designer who lives in Hobart, Ind., said the two men often fish and hunt together. That day, after an uneventful trip to Bass Pro Shops, the two parked on a quiet side road in Portage, where De La Torre lives, to go for a walk. They wanted to glimpse some grazing deer and to wander down near a fishing hole fed by Salt Creek.

Seeing the trail was muddy that day, the two men might have turned back.

De La Torre might not have seen the sunlight reflected off crumpled metal. As Garcia gingerly stepped toward the truck through the gravel rip-rap on the creek’s bank, he might have told himself it was an old wreck, nothing more than a curiosity.

He might not have come close enough to be lured even closer once he saw that the destroyed truck looked alarmingly new.

But once Garcia pulled back the airbag curtain and saw a man slumped in the front seat, he said, his limbs seemed to move automatically. He felt his hand rising to grab the man’s shoulder. He saw the man stirring and turning his head.

Reum stared at Garcia for a moment, then said this to the first person he'd seen in nearly six days: “Are you real?”

An improbable rescue

What Garcia felt in that moment he soon recognized in the shocked expressions of the dozens of firefighters, police officers and paramedics who swarmed to the scene after De La Torre, making the most consequential call of his life, dialed 911.

"I went to move him a little bit, and when he turned around, I almost died right there,” said Garcia, standing near the creek with De La Torre that day during a conversation that an Indiana state trooper captured on bodycam footage. "He scared the hell out of me.”

The arduous rescue effort temporarily stopped all traffic on that section of I-94. A helicopter soon landed on the road to fly Reum to Memorial Hospital, where he’d stay for the next three weeks.

"State troopers couldn't believe that I was alive, and the firefighters couldn't," Reum later recounted. "Nobody could believe that I was alive."

Portage Fire Department Chief Chris Crail said it’s common for crews to respond to high-speed crashes on I-94. Firefighters often make use of the set of hydraulic tools, called the jaws of life, with which they removed Reum from his truck.

But it was unusual for them to cut through and pry apart the smashed metal while a crash victim sat there, attentive and full of hope. When the jaws of life are needed, that typically means a victim is dead or unconscious, Crail said.

In Reum’s case, crew members would know if their maneuvers were causing him pain. They would deal with his anxiety on top of their own if the hour-long effort to extricate his body failed.

“We’ve seen vehicles with a lot less damage than his with people that did not survive,” Crail said. “To encounter his vehicle, with the amount of damage that it sustained, and for him to be alive — yeah, it’s amazing.”

After a pause, Crail, a 23-year-member of the fire department he now leads, went further: “It is nothing short of a miracle.”

Matt’s aunt Sue Ann Reum and his dad, Rex Reum, found out Matt was being airlifted to the hospital after spending days pinned in his truck the same way nearly everyone else did: news reports.

His family began to suspect something terrible had happened when Christmas passed without any word from Matt. Both his aunt and his father live in Georgia, and Matt had just joined his aunt for Thanksgiving.

His aunt works as a speech pathologist, and for years, she'd supported patients who suffered traumatic brain injuries. During her first call with physicians, she asked with dread about Matt’s condition. Could he talk? Was he brain-dead? Was he paralyzed?

The physician assured her Reum’s cognition was fine. No paralysis, either.

Then he chuckled, she remembers, and told her this: “The big story was that he had kept asking for a Big Mac and a Coke during the rescue.”

Facing adversity, Matt Reum leads with humor

Reum faces profound challenges. After two amputation surgeries, he lost his left leg up to his thigh. Until he gets a prosthetic leg, he must shuffle with a walker or roll in a wheelchair. A welder by trade, someone who loves to travel around the country to various job sites, his career prospects are newly in doubt.

But what’s made his recovery compelling to his family and to thousands of strangers following him online is the optimism and good humor he’s projecting anyway.

It started from the moment he was found. During the rescue, the Portage fire chief said, Reum eased the tension by chatting with firefighters about the dramatically named jaws of life. Many first responders heard the request for a Big Mac and a Coke, including the flight nurses who doubted Reum would survive the helicopter ride to Memorial Hospital.

“Matt always said while he was in the hospital that if he could keep a positive outlook,” his father said, “it made the jobs that the other people had to do easier.”

In an interview with The Tribune, Reum's sense of humor was alive and well after the crash that nearly killed him.

The topic was hard to discuss, and he wanted to break the ice. So with his country twang and social ease, Reum didn’t shy away from jokes that would be crass for anyone else to say.

A big change after the crash, he said with a glance toward the bandaged nub of his left thigh, is that he now starts every day off on the right foot.

All of the interviews and social media attention, he said, are a ploy for Ram to sponsor him and replace his totaled truck. (He already bought a new car.)

He is half-jokingly bewildered by the millions of people captivated by his story, once summing up his tale of survival this way: “All I did was just sit there for six days.”

But he takes seriously all of the messages strangers have sent him saying his story inspired them or even talked them off a ledge. From a total of five continents, he said, he’s received thousands of online messages and handwritten letters.

In videos that have come to dominate Reum's social media accounts since the crash, he shares updates on his recovery and confesses his struggle to maintain a healthy mindset. He worries out loud about how he’ll defend himself when he’s out at night using a walker. He’s open about his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and the bouts of depression and anxiety that have plagued him for years.

And he's frank when talking about how bizarre and sad it is that hundreds of strangers depend on his story to keep them going. While he by no means recommends his videos as a replacement for close friendships or professional help — “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he admits — he sees his new platform as a chance to steer people away from despair.

“Sometimes all people need is to see somebody who went through hell and is smiling, and, you know, that gives people encouragement,” Reum said. “And that's all I try to do. I’m not a God-send. I’m not a hero. ... I’m still just me. I’ve always made people laugh.”

The role does seem oddly natural to him. Born in Russia and adopted when he was 3 years old, Reum moved around a lot growing up. He was always the new kid in school, so he learned to be charismatic to make friends. His time in group therapy as a child, although he didn’t like it, gave him language to understand his emotions.

Eventually he landed at a Baptist boys home in Missouri and stayed there from age 13 or so to adulthood, he said. Boys came in with behavioral and substance use problems. He stayed longer than most, shifting him into a de facto big brother role. He savored the chance to share with others what had made him feel better.

“The thing is, sometimes people just need a nice word,” Reum said. “Somebody to tell them that, even though it’s not gonna be OK, you still have their back. Because I know that there are times when I wish somebody would have said that to me."

It’s telling where Reum, who moved to the South Bend area in 2020, was headed the night of his accident.

After eating a late dinner, he said, he made a last-minute decision to drive to Missouri. Fog shrouded the roads, and Reum was exhausted from a lack of sleep. But an old friend’s mom had posted on social media that her son’s funeral was in two days.

Reum wrestled with the decision, kicking himself for having missed the visitation ceremony the week before. He wanted badly to share his gratitude toward the family and pay his respects. He decided he would go.

Moments later, he was pinned in his truck in the cold darkness. Days later, he was jotting down what he believed would be his last words.

What Matt Reum's living for

First responders don’t usually get to meet the victims they save, said Crail, the Portage fire chief. And they rarely learn much about all of the people they couldn't help. The old-school way to deal with that trauma was to bury it, perhaps to self-soothe in unhealthy ways.

No firefighter is lured by the dark side of the work, Crail said, but by the high-adrenaline heroics. They soon learn the truth.

But at Reum’s request, Crail and three other firefighters visited him in the hospital. So did Garcia and De La Torre.

“The six days I was down there were the longest, scariest, most terrifying days of my life, because that (last) day I had given up hope,” Reum says in a video shared by Beacon Health System. Crail is seated to his right, looking at Reum attentively.

“I think I handed you my notebook. But that notebook had my obituary in it,” Reum says to another firefighter, who's softly shaking his head in disbelief. “And it had a suicide note to my best friend, because I was not planning on getting through that day.”

But then two modest outdoorsmen showed up. The sirens that had sounded tantalizingly close overhead for the past several days finally were heading toward him. The world, roaring right past him for so many hopeless hours, at last stopped to help.

Some see Reum’s story as an act of God. It certainly seems miraculous, he concedes. Some see it as a testament to one man’s unshakable will to live. Even though he tried to quit, down there in the truck, he didn’t.

Maybe his rescue was an utter coincidence.

Maybe it doesn't matter.

Maybe what matters is the note a firefighter handed to Reum at the end of that hospital visit. Paraphrasing, the note said this: You’re going to come across somebody whose life is changed forever by your story.

“I don’t know if I’ve already met that person,” Reum said. “But, I mean, until I know for sure, I’m going to keep helping."

Pausing, he added: "And I may never know for sure.”

Who among us will? That's why we keep helping.

Email South Bend Tribune city reporter Jordan Smith at JTsmith@gannett.com. Follow him on X: @jordantsmith09

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Matt Reum tells how his survival led to online mental health advocacy