Rick Harper was driving on Lake Shore Boulevard early Thursday morning on his way to a Canada Post plant in Mississauga when he saw flames ahead of him.
A Tesla had just lost control, crashed into a guardrail, and struck a concrete pillar just after 12:15 a.m. The vehicle, with five occupants inside, then caught fire.
Harper recalled seeing five to six feet of flames above the front hood of the car.
Equipped with a fire extinguisher, Harper decided to pull over and help.
“But as soon as I got out of the truck, they were yelling, you know, that they needed a bar or something to break the window because they were basically pounding the window with their hands, and that wasn’t getting anybody anywhere. So, I grabbed the bar out of the truck I had,” Harper recounted to CTV News Toronto on Friday.
He and another person, who also stopped to help, smashed the back door window.
“(I) took a few swings at the window, and I passed the bar onto the fella beside me, and he took a few swings, and then the window came out. And then (it) was good to see the young lady come out head first out of the window,” Harper recalled.
The woman was able to walk away from the car and sit on the side of the road, where another passerby comforted her. Police said the 25-year-old woman was later taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Harper said he gave the fire extinguisher to other people who tried to put out the flames.
He didn’t know there were other occupants inside besides the driver. Harper said the woman who was rescued didn’t offer any information.
“There was panic in her eyes. Nobody asked her anything. She probably wouldn’t be able to talk,” he said. “We just assumed it was a driver who was trapped, and without fire equipment, we couldn’t do anything for the driver.”
Harper remembered seeing the inside of the Tesla dark and full of smoke and hearing what he described as a “small voice” that was “letting out yells.”
“It was so muffled and so quiet and so weak. That’s what hurts, hearing a voice and then finding out later, a few hours later, people were in that car, and nobody knew. Nobody knew until the fire was out,” he said.
According to police, the four remaining occupants, three men and a woman, died in the crash.
The names of the victims have not been released but police said they were a 26-year-old man, a 29-year-old man, a 32-year-old man and a 30-year-old woman.
The incident was traumatic for Harper, who said it left him upset.
“If we had known there was somebody else, we would have tried to crawl in the window or grab somebody else, but it was dark inside the car. You couldn’t see in there,” he said.
Fearing that there could be an explosion, Harper shortly left the scene.
“I had to get it out of there. I didn’t know if the battery was going to blow up, and, you know, cause a big fire with all the equipment around there,” he said, adding that he also wanted to give emergency vehicles space as they arrived.
“I just continued on after I did everything I could do.”
Fire crews quickly extinguished the flames when they arrived.
It remains unclear what caused the driver to lose control of the vehicle.
“The haunting part is hearing a voice and knowing you can do nothing, waiting for the fire trucks to come and put that fire out and, you know, make people safe,” Harper said.
With files from CP24.com’s Joshua Freeman