Former Laguna Beach Star Escapes Injury in Crash

Danny Lane, a former star baseball and football player at Laguna Beach High, was unhurt Friday in an early-morning car crash that injured three Jamestown Expos teammates and the team’s trainer.

“He’s fine,” General Manager Tom O’Reilly said of Lane. “He had no injuries.”

But Jim Henderson, a Westlake Village Westlake graduate, was in serious condition at Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo.

The trainer, 24-year-old Lee Slagle of Lafayette, Ala., was charged with drunk driving.

Henderson, 23, a catcher and designated hitter who completed his eligibility at Arizona State this season and recently signed a free-agent contract with the Montreal Expos, sustained back, neck and forehead injuries. After early paralysis, he regained full movement on his left side and some feeling on his right, according to his mother, Barbara Berg. Henderson was scheduled to undergo surgery.

“Obviously they can’t promise anything,” Berg said. “But the doctors went as far as saying there was a good possibility they could make him normal.”

Lane was examined and released. A three-year starter at UC Santa Barbara, he was named first-team All-Big West at shortstop for his recently completed junior season and selected in the 24th round of this year’s amateur draft by the Expos. He was a four-year baseball starter at Laguna Beach, hitting .457 as a senior, and played quarterback for the school’s league champion football team.

The crash came four days into the Class A New York-Penn League season. Lane had appeared in all four games before Friday, going one for nine, driving in a run and scoring twice. Henderson was one for three, with three runs batted in and two runs scored.

Ellicott, N.Y., police Sgt. Ira Rhodes said the car driven by Slagle was returning to Jamestown shortly after midnight Friday. Slagle attempted to pass a tractor-trailer truck on a four-lane eastbound stretch of Route 17, Rhodes said. The car went over a median and skidded 300 feet before rolling over.

“This team is blessed those guys are still alive,” Jamestown Manager Q.V. Lowe told Scott Kindberg of the Jamestown Post-Journal.

Lowe visited the hospitalized players.

“One of them said, ‘When the car went airborne, I thought I was dead,’ ” Lowe said.

Other players in the car were first baseman Tom Doyle, 21, of Burnsville, Minn., and pitcher Rodney Henderson, 21, of Glasgow, Ky. Both sustained minor injuries.

Times Staff Writers T.C. Porter and Steven Herbert contributed to this story.