Family Already Planning Reunion with Strangers Who Saved Mom and Son (Exclusive)

Jonni Evans had just left her son’s doctor’s appointment when she drove through what she believed was a puddle on an Ohio highway last month. Within seconds, her car started to hydroplane, sending her and her 7-year-old son Michael, who was in the backseat, across the center line into oncoming traffic. 

When she opened her eyes, her windshield was shattered and the car was smoky. She screamed for someone to get Michael, who was silent behind her.

“I was trapped. My legs were stuck,” Evans tells PEOPLE through tears. “I couldn’t see. I literally couldn’t move at all, and I just started screaming on top of my lungs for someone to get my son out the car.” 

As she spun out of control on Columbia Parkway around 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 6, Evans says she could see an SUV approaching her head on but could do nothing to stop it.

“I was yelling and I was freaking out because I couldn’t control my car,” she says.

The oncoming SUV hit the front end of her car with a level of force she says she can still feel when she thinks or talks about the crash.

Her son was left paralyzed from the mid-chest down, had to have his left leg amputated at the knee and two thirds of his bowel removed — and is still in the hospital almost a month later, where he is intubated and fighting an infection.

Evans, who lives in Cincinnati and was only recently released from the hospital herself, was powerless to help him. As it turned out, she fractured her left hip and broke her right knee, her right foot and her left ribs in the crash, among other injuries.

Thankfully, she says, two complete strangers, who just happened to be driving by, came to the rescue: Christopher Collette and David Sebastian.

On the day of the crash, Sebastian, who lives in West Harrison, Indiana, was driving in the opposite direction on his way home. Although he didn’t witness the collision, he did see the SUV still sliding on its side, prompting him to pull over.

He and his son Cole, 18, cut the airbags in the SUV and helped the driver out, then turned their focus to Evans and her son.

Sebastian, 47, says he could instantly tell they “weren’t in good shape” and he jumped into the front seat to check whether Evans was breathing, while Collette tried to resuscitate Michael in the backseat.

Within minutes, the two men set Michael on the ground for more support — Sebastian says the backseat “was too cushiony” — to continue to perform chest compressions and CPR. 

“It was the good Lord above that was running my hands, because I have no trauma experience,” says Sebastian, who performed the chest compressions. 

Collette did have CPR training — a requirement before he became a Boy Scouts leader — and also through his employer, the United States Space Force. The father of four, who lives in Anderson Township in Ohio, was off work that week in anticipation of his daughter’s wedding, and had been on his way home after having golfed with one of his three sons. Had he not been off work, he would not have been on that road, which he traveled infrequently.

“When I stopped giving the CPR and the paramedics took over, he was turning a little blue, but once I started blowing into him and the chest compressions, he started getting some of his color back,” Collette says. “So we felt like, or, at least, I felt like we were doing something of value to get blood flowing.”

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Michael’s paternal grandmother, Ashley Meucci, 40, whose son, Michael Askins is the boy’s father and Evans’ boyfriend, says her grandson had a lacerated abdominal aorta and that doctors had tried to resuscitate him with blood before they could operate on him.

“The doctors told us that he had a 1% chance of surviving the night,” Meucci says.

Meucci launched a GoFundMe to support Michael and Evans. She met Collette about a week after the crash, after Askins asked the public’s help in locating the men who helped save his son.

“She profusely thanked me, but I thanked her,” Collette says of Meucci. “I told her that it changed my life, too. It gave me a more validating ideal of happiness and goodness in this world. So that’s what I take away from this — the affirmation part of it. The goodness of it.”

Both men have kept in touch with the family by phone and through text messages and Collette gifted Michael a medal of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travel — and they’re already planning to reunite after Michael is released from the hospital.

Collette believes God placed him at the scene to aid Michael.

“I would hope that goodness prevails no matter what in life,” Collette, 59, says. “I would hope that folks would step toward danger and be good and decent.”

Sebastian also credited a greater force with his actions that day.

“I was a tool in God’s toolbox, and he was just using me because there’s no rhyme or reason for what I did,” he says. “I could have just kept driving and not even thought about it, but the good Lord works in mysterious ways.”