Good Samaritan Sees Message In Tragedy
Francis Betz takes pride in always being prepared for emergencies.
His is a moral universe where nothing happens by accident or chance. Problems are opportunities for growth. There’s a lesson in everything that happens, good or bad.
Considering Betz’s firm commitment to this philosophy, it may not be difficult, then, to understand why the 52-year-old Salem elementary school teacher has not lost his faith despite his circumstances.
On a rainy Sunday morning earlier this month, Betz was rounding one of the blind turns in the Terwilliger curves, when he came upon a woman whose car was turned backward in the fast lane.
Betz pulled alongside her, rolled down the window, asked if she needed help. She nodded. He moved his Jeep to shield her from the traffic. He grabbed five flares.”Get the police,” Betz yelled. “There’s going to be a tragedy out here.”
He held the first flare over his head, so drivers would see and avoid him. Before he could place the second flare on the road, a pair of cars came around the curve. One slammed on its brakes and the other slammed into it.
Flare over his head, he ran past the accident to drop the flares to prevent a pile-up. He angled three flares across the blocked lane.
Betz was lighting the last flare, when a Nissan pick-up came around the bend, steered into the median, then plowed him over.
“He got creamed,” said Dr. Paul Duwelius, the Oregon Health Sciences University surgeon who pieced together Betz’s pulverized hip.
Duwelius was at Betz’s bedside two days later when he regained full consciousness. The doctor expected Betz to cry out for pain killer or ask the extent of damage to his body.
His response, Duwelius said, showed he was no ordinary patient.
“He said, ‘Hi. Would you find somebody who’d come down here to give me communion?”’
Unlike a lot of accident victims, Betz didn’t get mad. Instead, Betz began to wonder “almost immediately, What does this mean?”
Betz had been on his way to St. Edward’s Catholic Church in Keizer when the accident happened. He had planned to talk to Father Mike Hemming about ideas he had to take Christmas presents to orphans in Vietnam and help find shoes for them.
He now wonders if the purpose of the accident may be to call attention to his Vietnam projects.