Minivan dragged for 16 miles after rear-ending then becoming wedged under semi-truck

A minivan was dragged for 16 miles on a northern Michigan highway after it rear-ended a semi-truck and became stuck, according to the Roscommon County Sheriff’s Office. Visibility was low just before 2am on Wednesday when the minivan hit the rear of a semi-truck trailer in the northbound lanes of I-75 south of Roscommon, which is about 70 miles north of Mount Pleasant. The driver of the minivan, Matt Menz, said he never saw the trailer turn on flashing lights to warn of slow speeds before the crash.

The truck driver couldn’t see the minivan, carrying a family of four, tucked under the rear right end of the trailer, so he kept driving. Menz said he initially tried to free the minivan when the semi was going slowly, but as road conditions improved and it sped up, he didn’t want to become dislodged because he was afraid the minivan would roll. He told his wife to call 911. “We ran into the back of a semi-truck and he’s not stopping and our car is embedded underneath of it,”
Pamela Menz told a Roscommon County 911 dispatcher. The minivan’s horn was broken when it hit the semi, she said, so they couldn’t use it to alert the truck driver they were caught. They initially weren’t able to tell dispatchers where they were on the highway because the snow made it too difficult to see. “We can’t see. Everything frozen up because our heater’s gone,” Pamela Menz said. Matt Menz said he tried to stay focused on talking to the dispatcher. “If you allow yourself to panic, you’re kind of just useless,” he said. “There was time for that after we got stopped.”

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Eventually, they were able to see that the semi was signalling that he was going to get off at the first Roscommon exit. “We’re gonna go where he goes,” Matt Menz told the dispatcher. “We have no choice.” The semi-truck driver, still unaware the minivan was dragging behind the trailer, kept driving north into Crawford County. “I just want to get off the back of this thing,” Pamela Menz told a dispatcher. In all, the minivan was towed along for 16 miles and 25 harrowing minutes. Sheriff’s deputies were finally able to locate and stop the vehicles south of Grayling. While no one was seriously injured in the crash, the minivan’s occupants were taken to a local hospital to get checked out.