Newport Officer, Scout Save Youth From Flaming Car Wreckage

Flames had engulfed the engine of the car crumpled against a garage on Spyglass Hill in Newport Beach. Two youths had managed to clamber through a shattered window on the driver’s side, and the heat was so intense the car’s aluminum block engine was melting.

That’s when Police Officer Mark Everton, who had turned to chase the speeding white Nissan less than a minute before, heard screams from inside the blazing wreckage Thursday night.

Everton, 33, rushed to the car as the fire spread into the passenger compartment and across the floorboard. Fanning smoke, he peered inside and saw Alex Stamires wedged under the dashboard with compound fractures in both legs. Lifting him under the arms, Everton, assisted by Eric Trapp, a police Explorer Scout passing by at that moment, carried the 16-year-old to safety as flames consumed the car.

‘It’s the Worst Wreck. . . .”

“To look at the car, it shocked me that anyone survived,” Everton said Friday. “It’s the worst wreck I have ever seen without a fatal.”

Everton, a 14-year police veteran who rescued a woman from a burning house in Orange 12 years ago, was unhurt.

Friday evening, Carole Chickering of Corona del Mar, whose son David, 16, was a passenger in the Nissan’s back seat, had only praise for Everton.

“I speak for all the families when I say we’re very thankful for the officer,” Chickering said. “We’re relieved and thankful that everyone is OK.”

Speaking of her son, she said: “He’s a changed kid today. His attitude about how fast an accident can happen and how careful you have to be has completely changed. He ended upside down in the car with his face bashed in. It’s a hard lesson to learn, and he’s in a lot of pain. We were all pretty amazed that the kids survived.”

Her son, treated at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and released, suffered facial fractures and loosened teeth in the 10:30 p.m. accident, Chickering said.

Stamires was taken to the same hospital and underwent surgery on his broken legs, police said. He was listed in stable condition Friday.

Jeff K. Chow, 16, of Corona del Mar, the driver, was treated and released from Hoag Memorial Hospital in Newport Beach, police said.

Apparently the three teen-agers were traveling south on Cambria Drive, headed home from the movies, and Everton was headed north, police said. As he passed the Nissan, Everton said he saw what looked like fireworks being thrown from the passenger side of the car.

As he made a U-turn to follow the Nissan, it disappeared up the hill. A quarter-mile later he saw the car smashed against a garage on Cambria Drive.

Police investigators later determined that the youths must have been traveling up the hill at more than 55 m.p.h., spokesman Gregg Armstrong said.

The Nissan sideswiped a parked Chevrolet truck, jumped a curb, smashed through a large brick mailbox and then flipped onto its side, wedged between a concrete planter box and the garage, Armstrong said. Bricks from the mailbox were hurled almost 100 feet when the car struck it, he said.

Police found a sack of firecrackers that the youths apparently threw onto the road when they spotted Everton’s patrol car, Armstrong said.

The fire caused minor damage to the garage roof, Armstrong said.

No charges have been filed, but an investigation is continuing, police said.