Mower mangles teen caught under it

An emergency room doctor applies first aid at the scene as others step in to help the worker.

By JUSTIN GEORGE, Times Staff Writer
Published September 7, 2007

TAMPA - Luz Hernandez, picking up papers in her Tampa Palms home office, heard faint cries.

She looked out her front door and saw no one, just a lawn mower sitting on the pavement of Londonderry Drive.

But she heard it again, looked once more and saw just a trace of a person.

"All I saw was his head," Hernandez, 33, said. "His entire body was underneath the lawn cutting machine."

Beneath it lay Felipe Diaz, 17, a lawn maintenance worker. The mower had stopped abruptly, and he had been checking the brake when it lurched forward and pinned him, he would later tell a witness.

Hernandez raced outside and tried to lift the machine, which had stopped by then, with Diaz's mangled body beneath it.

It was too heavy. She needed help, but the teen's co-worker from V.I.P. Landscaping was working in a neighbor's back yard and couldn't hear anything.

She ran back inside and woke up her husband, Dr. Farid Visram, an emergency room doctor at Tampa General and Brandon Regional hospitals. He worked the late shift Thursday and was taking a nap before work.

Visram rushed out the door, and together, husband and wife tried to lift the mower off of the teen. It wouldn't budge.

They called for a neighbor across the street, and together the three hoisted the machine just enough for the teen to crawl out.

Below the knee, the boy's right leg was broken in two pieces, both hanging together by tissue, Hernandez said.

Pieces of his chopped up tennis shoe lay on the asphalt; a shoelace lay several yards away on a sidewalk like a coiled snake.

"Once I saw that leg," she said, "I started walking away and fainting."

But Visram, 31, has seen countless similar injuries in his four years practicing medicine at Brandon Regional and Tampa General, the city's busiest hospital and the area's only Trauma 1 center. The sight didn't turn his stomach, though he had never seen anything like it outside of work.

He pulled the leg straight and used a piece of plywood his neighbor found to stabilize it, he said.

He applied pressure to the wounds, but the teen's bleeding had somehow stopped. He wasn't sure if a blood vessel was even torn, he said.

Visram assessed the injuries as a "below the knee partial amputation of the right leg." Two left fingers were missing, and the teen had abrasions on his head.

Gail Norman, a retired family doctor, who lives around the corner, was at Visram's side, also taking stock of the injuries. A neighbor had summoned her to the scene.

"Real bad," she would say later. "Almost amputated. He still had some blood flow there. ... The main artery was cut. He didn't have any pulses in that leg."

His tibia the larger of two bones in the lower leg had been shattered, she said.

Paramedics arrived at the gated Westover subdivision within 9 minutes and called for an airlift. The teen was flown to Tampa General Hospital, where his injuries were characterized as serious but not life threatening, said Tampa Fire Rescue Capt. Bill Wade.

Just after the fire engines pulled away from his neighborhood, Visram jumped into a sedan and headed to work wearing blue scrubs.

The emergency room late shift awaited at Brandon Regional Hospital. He walked into the ER having already treated his first patient of the day.

Justin George can be reached at (813) 226-3368 or jgeorge@sptimes.com

[Last modified September 6, 2007, 23:51:30]