Motorist Tried His Best to Help Shoemaker : Accident: Hospital says former jockey’s condition has stabilized but remains critical.

From Terry Fisher’s perspective, Bill Shoemaker was in a perilous position right after his car rolled down an embankment off the Foothill Freeway in San Dimas Monday night.

Shoemaker’s car landed upright on a transition road below, and was sitting crosswise in a lane on a dark section of roadway where motorists accelerate as they merge onto the Foothill Freeway that eventually leads to the Orange Freeway.

Fisher and his 14-year-old daughter, April, were delivering belated Easter cards to friends in the San Gabriel Valley when they drove onto the transition road about 8 p.m.

“I was doing about 55 or 60 (m.p.h.) when I noticed a big cloud of dust and some faint tail lights,” Fisher said. “I jumped on my brakes real hard. Before I knew it, I was on top of it and I barely avoided hitting his Bronco.”

Fisher, director of manufacturing at Nav Com Electronics in El Monte, was the first motorist on the scene after Shoemaker, horse racing’s winningest jockey, was involved in a single-car collision that has left him in critical condition with a broken neck.

A spokesman at Centinela Hospital Medical Center in Inglewood said in a statement Wednesday that Shoemaker has stabilized but remains critical.

“He is alert, responsive and his spirit is strong,” the statement said. “He has paralysis of both the upper and lower extremities.”

A close friend of Shoemaker said the former jockey has a halo-fixation device attached to his head, and a tube down his throat.

“He’s responding with his eyes, twitching with his nose,” said the friend, who asked not to be identified. “He’s like a little rabbit with his nose, we’ve all seen that.

Said Marje Everett, former chief operating officer at Hollywood Park, “Shoe is a fighter. He is very savvy, but the tube doesn’t permit him to talk. I don’t know what it is, but it facilitates his breathing. He is fighting. He wants to live.”

Shoemaker was on his way to an Arcadia restaurant after having played golf at the Sierra LaVerne Country Club when the accident occurred, according to trainer Don Pierce, a longtime friend who was among a fivesome at the golf course.

Shoemaker, 59, had a blood-alcohol content of 0.13%, or nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08%, according to results from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s crime laboratory. Officer Joe Flores of the California Highway Patrol said an arrest report will be sent to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office in Pomona today.

None of that mattered to Fisher, though, when he reached Shoemaker moments after the 1990 Ford Bronco II came to rest in the middle of the road.

At first, Fisher thought the car had been driven off the shoulder, but as he approached he saw that the top of the vehicle was battered and that auto body parts were scattered across the roadway. He turned on the emergency flashers in his pickup truck and got out.

Two cars came down the transition road behind him, skidding and screeching.

“It was like a stock car race where both of them slid in behind each other and went in that one lane that was open,” said Fisher, who also is an engineering student at Cal Poly Pomona.

Fisher saw that Shoemaker was slumped over the steering wheel in a radical position. “I said, ‘This guy is not moving,’ ” he said. “I thought he must have some kind of head and neck injuries because his head was that far forward. It was just a little bit under the top lip of the ring of the steering wheel.

“I reached into the broken window and pulled his head back a little bit. He wasn’t moving or doing anything. I couldn’t detect that he was breathing.”

Fisher forced open the door, reached in and adjusted the bucket seat so that Shoemaker was reclining.

“His feet were kind of tangled up and I untangled them,” Fisher said. “I unbuckled his seat belt and pulled his shirt out of his pants to try to get him breathing.”

Fisher said that while trying to get Shoemaker to breathe, he used a free hand to put a sweater lying in the car on top of Shoemaker’s head.

“I wanted to keep his cut from bleeding too much,” he said.

About that time, two others arrived at the scene.

“I asked one guy to help me, but he said, ‘No, I can’t do that, I can’t get close to that. But I’ll try to keep the traffic away,’ ” Fisher said.

Fisher said another motorist stopped and used a car telephone to call for help. A woman who was driving in a lane next to Shoemaker on the Foothill Freeway also stopped and used an emergency call box on the side of the freeway.

She later told Fisher that she could not believe Shoemaker suddenly veered off the road.

“Did I really see what I saw?” she wondered aloud.

Although paramedics were called, Fisher remained with Shoemaker. He said he was familiar with emergency procedures from CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) classes and paramedic friends.

“I said to another guy standing over me, ‘I don’t know what to do, I think this guy is dead,’ ” Fisher said. “I was pushing on his chest cavity trying to get him some CPR, trying to get some air circulating and moving. His tongue was out of his mouth a little bit and I opened his mouth and made sure his throat passage was clear. I wiped his face off, because I said, ‘If this guy’s got a chance, I’m going to have to give him mouth-to-mouth.’

“I thought, which was selfish, ‘This guy has blood all over him, he looks like he is dead to me, do I really want to take the risk of getting AIDS by putting my mouth on his blood-soaked face?’ Well, I said, ‘Forget that, I’m going to take the chance.’ Just before I put my mouth on his I listened to his breath in my ear one more time and I heard a little gasp of air.

“I said, ‘Geez, I’m starting to get something. So, I started pushing on his chest cavity again, and then I got a puff of air, which was real sporadic. I waited a second, pushed again, and got a response back. Between the two of us, we worked it into a regular rhythm of breathing.”

Philip Hatch, the Los Angeles County Fire Dept. captain who arrived on the scene with a paramedic, said getting a victim breathing is essential.

“If somebody is not breathing for five minutes, they’re gone,” he said. “But I don’t know if (Shoemaker) was breathing or not or if the guy did the right thing or not. I couldn’t speculate.”

Paramedics took over from Fisher, but had difficulty finding a vein with enough blood pressure to start intravenous (IV) fluids.

“We were trying to get IVs on both arms,” Hatch said.

Hatch said he ordered a search of the embankment to ensure that no one else was injured.

Fisher, who did not know the victim was Shoemaker, said he held the IV bottles and kept pressure on the head wound for the paramedics. Shoemaker was then stabilized.

“They slid something in behind him and then held him in place while I put the Velcro strap across his forehead,” Fisher said. “Then I backed off. I wanted to get my daughter out of there.”

Fisher, who attended Franklin High in Highland Park more than 20 years ago, finished delivering his cards. At one friend’s home he recounted the accident. He described the victim as a small man.

“I told them he was the size of a jockey,” he said.

Shoemaker is 4 feet 11, about 100 pounds.

After taking his daughter home, Fisher decided to go to a nearby hospital to see what happened.

“I couldn’t just leave it unsettled,” he said.

Fisher went to Foothill Presbyterian Hospital in Glendora but was told by an emergency room nurse, “ ‘Shoemaker isn’t here.’

“That was the first I heard Shoemaker’s name,” he said.

Fisher owns four horses for recreation riding, and said he saw Shoemaker at Santa Anita a few times in the jockey’s 41-year career.

Fisher went to Glendora Community Hospital, where Shoemaker was first taken. When he arrived, he saw a television camera crew and lot of commotion outside the emergency room. Then he knew he had helped the famous jockey, whom he had seen only two weeks earlier at a celebrity dinner at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center.

“My wife said, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t recognize him while you were working on him. You’d just seen him,’ ” Fisher said. “I had forgotten that.”