A Blowout Devastates One Family’s World

As she drove along the Wyoming interstate, Jeanette Meek’s only thoughts were about how great her family vacation was going.

Her husband and a granddaughter rode with her in the Ford Explorer. Her son, daughter-in-law and other granddaughter followed in another vehicle.

Then she felt the shudder. A blowout.

Suddenly she was spinning through the air, flipping over and over. Glass shattered. Metal crunched. Then nothing.

When she came to, hanging by her seat belt, the Explorer was upside down, and so was her world.

Moments before, her husband had been buckled in the passenger seat. He was gone. Her 13-year-old granddaughter was dangling halfway out a window.

When the Meek family began their vacation last summer--traveling more than 1,000 miles from their home in the San Joaquin Valley--they had received no warning of a potential tire problem.

While camping, they were unaware of a recall of millions of Bridgestone/Firestone tires due to reported tread separations. The Meeks’ Explorer had those tires, and a Wyoming state patrol report would confirm that a left rear tire blowout caused the accident.

“In an instant, they were gone,” Jeanette Meek says. “Then I find out these two major American companies knew about these problems and didn’t tell us. They took my husband and my granddaughter, and now I want to know why.”

Early last August, Ford and Firestone officials met to discuss the recall of Radial ATX tires--at the same time that Don Mason was examining the ATX tires on the Meeks’ Explorer, according to documents in the family’s lawsuit against the companies.

Garry Lynn Meek had driven his wife’s SUV to his old friend Mason’s tire shop in Farmersville, an agricultural community of 7,100 about 50 miles south of Fresno. It was his routine before each vacation.

As the former Farmersville police chief and at the time a sheriff’s deputy, the 56-year-old Meek had seen firsthand the dangers that faced drivers who didn’t take care of their vehicles.

“They looked good to me,” Mason would later say of the tires.

The back tires were inflated to at least 26 PSI, Ford’s recommendation at the time, court records would show. At the time of the accident, the only tire not deflated measured 27 PSI, within range of Ford’s recommendation.

Bridgestone/Firestone has said Ford’s recommended inflation rate was too low and contributed to the blowouts. Ford has blamed the tire manufacturer, saying the tires were defective. Recently, after an additional 13 million tires were recalled, the two companies severed a nearly century-long business relationship.

Ford and Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. declined to comment on the Meeks’ case, citing pending litigation.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has collected reports of at least 174 fatalities and more than 700 injuries among more than 6,000 U.S. complaints that cite blowouts and other problems with certain Firestone tires.

Most of the accidents involved rollovers of the Ford Explorer, on which Firestone tires were standard equipment.

On Aug. 6, the Meek family piled into two vehicles for their camping trip near Big Piney, Wyo. The tire recall would be issued two days later.

The vacation was what getaways are supposed to be--restful, relaxing and fun.

While Garry and his son, James, went fishing, Jeanette took long walks with her two granddaughters, 13-year-old Amy and 10-year-old Melissa, sharing secrets and stories. The Meeks’ daughter-in-law, Roseanne, spent time with them too.

None of them remembers hearing about the nationwide recall of 6.5 million ATX, ATX II and Wilderness AT tires. They watched no television, read no newspapers, heard no recall news on the radio.

On Aug. 16, eight days after the recall, the family prepared to drive to Utah for the next leg of their trip.

At a convenience store, the girls had a quick breakfast of chicken strips and soda. Then Amy got into the Explorer--it was her turn to ride with her grandparents--and the caravan pulled onto U.S. 189.

Just a few miles down the road, it happened.

Cruising behind his parents’ Explorer, James saw the vehicle suddenly shudder. Then a cloud of dust.

Blowout, James thought.

In an instant, the Explorer was flipping across the roadway.

James and Roseanne yelled. Melissa, in the back seat, felt something squeezing her chest that made it hard to breathe.

All jumped out as soon as the Explorer came to rest.

James’ years as a volunteer firefighter took over. He knew he had to put aside his feelings as a father and son.

He saw Amy first, hanging halfway out the back passenger window. Her legs were crooked and bent, her arms limp. There was blood on her face, her head, her chest.

“Melissa, go get my knife,” he told his younger daughter. He didn’t want her to see her sister so badly injured.

Inside the Explorer, Jeanette was hanging upside down too. She tried to clear her head and think.

She tried to straighten Amy’s legs so James could pull her out. She pulled on the seat belt. Then James was cutting the belt, pulling his daughter from the wreckage.

As James performed CPR on Amy, and Roseanne tried to clean her wounds, Jeanette, bleeding and with multiple broken bones, told Melissa to find her purse and pick up the belongings that had been strewn across the shoulder of the road.

“I didn’t want her watching Amy. I gave her something to do,” Jeanette said.

Soon paramedics were working on Amy. Roseanne went along when the ambulance took her to a hospital. Other paramedics worked on Jeanette.

In the field, covered by a sheet, lay Garry. James stared at the body.

“Did I go with my daughter or did I stay with my dad? It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make--leaving my dad on the side of the road,” he later said.

He drove himself and Melissa to the hospital. There James met his wife, her face stained with tears.

Amy was dead.

Sometime after the accident, a sheriff’s deputy and one of the passing motorists who came to the family’s aid asked James about the tires on his father’s Ford.

“What are you talking about?” James said.

Through the night, as James called family members and friends with news of the deaths, he also watched news reports of the recall.

Later, standing outside a hospital and wearing the same blood-soaked clothing, James watched a man pull into the parking lot in a Ford Explorer with Bridgestone/ Firestone tires. A little girl was in the back seat.

“I went up to him and begged him to get his tires checked. I kept telling him my daughter and my dad had died, and about the tires,” he said.

More than 3,000 people turned out two weeks later at a Farmersville church for a memorial service.

Known as “Mr. Farmersville,” Garry was remembered as the man who helped create a thriving senior citizens’ center and trained police officers.

Amy was the quiet one, a respectful girl who looked forward to being a veterinarian, people said. She and her best friend, Fleddy Quinones, were going to go to college together, be roommates and get married in joint weddings.

Months later, on the eve of Amy’s 14th birthday, Feb. 23, the Meeks filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Bridgestone/Firestone and Ford.

Dozens of cases brought against Ford and the tire company already have been settled, and settlement talks continue in hundreds of others. No cases have gone to trial so far.

The Meeks said they won’t settle.

“Garry Lynn Meek and Amy Lynn Meek. [Those were] their names, and I want the companies to know that,” James said.

Melissa doesn’t talk about the details of the accident with her family and will only talk with a reporter out of earshot of her mom and dad.

Christmas was hard, she said. The tree was up. The gifts were there--except for one small wrapped package. It was nestled between the pillows on Amy’s four-poster bed. Months later, it was still there.

Melissa won’t tell anybody what’s in it. That’s between Amy and her, she said.

Before she rides in a car now, Melissa checks the tires. She’s not sure what she’s looking for, but she looks anyway.

“I don’t want it to happen again,” she said.