Boy, 9, Awakes to Take Control of Careening Car When Father Dies

Thanks to a quick-thinking heroic boy and a good Samaritan, Debbie Tretter’s two children are safe at home, survivors of a near disaster on a crowded freeway.

Late Saturday night, Tretter’s estranged husband, Michael, 37, lost consciousness while driving the couple’s small children toward his Brea home after a day at the beach. The paper-packaging salesman had custody of the children every other weekend.

As his car swerved across the lanes of the northbound Orange Freeway in Anaheim, the sound of the lane-dividers thumping against the tires woke 9-year-old Josh Tretter, who was sleeping on the passenger side of the front seat. Josh grabbed the wheel and tried to gain control of the car, which began to weave from lane to lane. Finally the boy managed to steer across three lanes to the center divider, slowing the vehicle with only minor damage to the car and the divider.

Among the cars behind the Tretter vehicle--many of which had sharply reduced speed and turned on their flashers, trying to avoid the swerving car--was Amy Doyle, on her way home to La Habra after visiting a friend.

“I saw the car,” she said in an interview. “But I didn’t know what was going on. As I drove past . . . I noticed the little boy steering the car.

“I’ve never stopped to help anybody on the freeway before and hadn’t planned on stopping,” Doyle said, but when she saw Josh she pulled over ahead of the Tretter car and stopped. She jumped out, leaving her own infant daughter in the car, and ran back to the Tretters’ moving vehicle, which was moving slowly toward her own. She opened the door, turned off the ignition and stepped on the brake.

She then took Josh and his 7-year-old sister, Kelley, who had been asleep in the back seat, to her car and then returned to check on the children’s father, but could find no pulse.

“I calmed the kids down for a minute,” she said, and then tried to get help from other passing motorists.

“Nobody would stop,” she said. “I was waving my hands, yelling, ‘Somebody help me!’ ”

A couple finally stopped and agreed to phone the police. Doyle spent the next three hours in her car, trying to comfort the Tretter children, while police, paramedics and, eventually, investigators from the coroner’s office were at the scene.

“At first,” Doyle said, the children were hysterical. “I tried to get their minds off what had happened.”

Because the coroner’s deputies had to wheel Michael Tretter past the Doyle car, the police decided it was necessary to tell the children that their father had died. They “got upset again,” Doyle said, and refused to be driven to their mother’s home by the police.

“So I took them home,” she said. They arrived in Fullerton at 2 a.m., where Amy Doyle met Debbie Tretter.

“This woman is an absolute angel,” Debbie Tretter said Monday.

Her son Josh, Tretter said, was “very heroic. He saved himself and his little sister.” She had no explanation of how the boy had the presence of mind to maneuver the car from the passenger seat across three lanes of traffic after waking up from a sound sleep in darkness.

“He’s always been capable of thinking far beyond his years,” she said. “Joshua’s not taking any credit at all.”

The Orange County coroner’s office conducted an autopsy Monday and said that no obvious cause had been determined for Michael Tretter’s death and that it would be the subject of further study. Debbie Tretter said her husband had suffered from heart problems since childhood.