I’m not usually up that late at night, but we had a sick horse, and I was checking on her. I was leaving the stables, which are near the highway, when I heard an almighty bang followed by screeching brakes. I looked over, and there was a huge truck — right in the middle of our front pasture.

It had smashed through our fence and demolished the old hen house. I ran over to help, but the driver appeared to be OK. Obviously he was shaken and a little dazed, but he had no injuries. He kept saying he’d seen a deer on the road and had swerved to miss it. In the twenty years we’ve lived here, I’ve never seen a deer on the road. Maybe the neighbor’s bull got out, although that hasn’t happened before either. He’s a prize bull, and Hank’s very protective of him. If you ask me, Mr. Gibbs was hiding something. He kept insisting that he hadn’t been feeling sleepy, and he even showed me his coffee thermos. Before then, it hadn’t crossed my mind that he’d fallen asleep.

I’d just come around a bend in the road — I was traveling about 45 or maybe 50 miles per hour. It wasn’t fast. I’d just had my dinner break, so I wasn’t tired either. I’ve never fallen asleep behind the wheel. I was reaching for some gum, and when I looked up, a deer was right in front of me. I only had my eyes off the road for a second. Without thinking, I hit the brakes. I didn’t want to kill anything. I went into a skid and lost control. The truck veered to the right, plowing through a fence and a small wooden building. I guess I traveled around seventy or eighty yards before I came to a stop in the middle of the field.

At 11:30 p.m., a Kenworth truck left the road just before the Brandon interchange. A lot of damage was done to the property of Marge Webster. The truck was driven by Tom Gibbs, who works for East–West Transportation. Mr. Gibbs travels this route five nights a week and is familiar with this part of the highway. Mr. Gibbs says that he lost control of his truck while trying to avoid a deer on the road. He says that he’d just come around a sharp corner and the deer took him by surprise. However, the skid marks on the road don’t appear until 200 yards after the corner. It would seem that Mr. Gibbs didn’t use his brakes until just before Mrs. Webster’s farm. It’s unusual to lose control of a truck on a straight piece of road. Mr. Gibbs was near the end of a twelve-hour shift, and tiredness may have been a factor.