At 4pm on a Friday afternoon in June 2019, Macy Smith, then 17 years old, was driving alone in a white hatchback near Pilot Mountain in North Carolina. The road twisted through a thick forest and a torrential summer storm lashed down. Macy lost control on a corner and the car hydroplaned, hurtling through the trees and flipping over three times before settling in a ravine. She was flung into the back seat and the vehicle pinned her left arm to the ground.
Macy was frantic: she stretched for her phone, but couldn’t reach it. She listened out for passing cars, but it was a remote spot and they didn’t come often. The first went by without stopping, then the next, then a third. It became dark. Macy had lost feeling in the arm that was trapped, and her neck throbbed. By 10.30pm, 28 cars had come and gone. But then the 29th did stop: Macy heard the doors open, and the voices of her stepfather and brother calling her name. They followed the tyre skids down the embankment and her stepfather held her hand through the blown-out sunroof. Macy had kept it together until this point, but now she sobbed.
