SIAP: Woman went over the causeway yesterday and lived

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Stonom had been driving home on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway from her job at East Jefferson General Hospital when she realized she had forgotten something and needed to turn back, she said Tuesday.

She put on her left-turn signal to pull into the crossover at the 12-mile marker, checking her rearview mirror as she did so. But the pickup truck that was behind her didn’t slow down, she said.


“I felt myself being hit from the back. The car was flipping, fishtailing in the air. It flipped three times,” she said. “It felt like it was flipping a long time. Then it hit the water.”

Stonom said she doesn't typically drive with her window down. But for some reason Monday she had rolled it down, she said.

That open window allowed her to escape the rapidly sinking vehicle. When she came to the surface she spotted people above her on the bridge.

“I said ‘Help me, help me,’” Stonom said. She could hear them calling out, “She’s alive!”

Dustin Day, a construction worker who was driving home from a charter school remodeling job in Algiers, saw the crash, his wife, Roxanne, said. He described it to her as a scene from a movie, with the vehicle doing barrel rolls through the air.

“He said, ‘When I ran to the rail, all I saw was bubbles, the car was already down. Then I saw a head pop up, and she was screaming and crying.’”

He told her to hang on and got tie straps out of his truck. He tied them together and threw them to her, holding on with one hand while he called police with the other, his wife said.

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