By Phil Trexler, Akron Beacon Journal –
AKRON, Ohio — Neither his friends nor his parents are surprised by what Christopher Burgess did when sitting behind the wheel of his runaway dump truck.
Ahead of him, at the bottom of a downhill road, were children in minivans, shoppers and workers in a busy plaza, and people just driving down the road in Akron.
All were oblivious to Burgess and his rumbling, apparently brakeless, dump truck until the last seconds.
On Thursday, when Burgess, 41, managed to avoid harming others only to crash and die in the Cuyahoga River, strangers immediately hailed him a hero for sounding his truck’s horn and waving his arms to the innocent bystanders at the hill’s bottom.
The next day, his family and friends echoed the same thoughts. To them, he is a hero, something his parents say he always aspired to be as a child.
“In this case, maybe he was a hero by fate,” said his father, Roger Burgess.
Authorities and witnesses say it appeared the brakes failed on the dump truck Burgess was driving down the steeply inclined road at about 11 a.m. Thursday. He sounded his horn as he approached a red light, then went straight into Akron’s Valley Centre Plaza shopping center.
Somehow, Burgess did not strike a vehicle, building or person as he passed through the plaza parking lot at about 50 mph. He hooked a slight left turn between two businesses and went toward a river embankment, where he struck a large tree. The truck turned over and slid down the river bank.
An autopsy Friday showed Burgess died of blunt force trauma to the neck. A spokesman said Burgess probably was dead before the cab of his truck entered the river. It took more than three hours before the vehicle and Burgess’ body were pulled out of the water.
The State Highway Patrol is investigating the crash and the vehicle, a 2004 Sterling tri-axle dump truck. Burgess had worked for Huber Trucking in Mogadore, Ohio, for less than a month.
“I think it’s awesome what he did,” said Steve Graham, Burgess’ best friend. “The good book says, ‘When you lay down your life for a friend, what a better gift.’ And yet he laid his life down for people he didn’t even know.”
Burgess had been driving trucks most of his adult life and had a commercial driver’s license since for nearly 20 years, logging some 600,000 miles behind the wheel in a typical year.
The two friends talked by phone about 8:30 a.m. Thursday as Burgess was driving his dump truck up Portage Trail, presumably to pick up the 15-ton load of sand he was carrying when he crashed.
Graham recalled Burgess’ generosity and how the bachelor showered Graham’s children with gifts, even when he was between jobs.
“He always had a heart of gold,” Graham said. “His heart was the size of Montana. … I think he did what he hoped to do (while descending the hill): to not risk the lives of others.”
Burgess’ parents, Roger and Claire, married for 49 years, took a steady stream of phone calls and visitors to their tidy Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, home on Friday. They said their only child had an imposing appearance at 6-foot-2 and nearly 400 pounds. And his huge arms matched the size of his heart, they said.
“He had a tough exterior, but a soft heart,” Claire Burgess said.
Roger Burgess said his son was an experienced truck driver, who worked 15 years driving trucks over the road, from coast to coast, until he was laid off a little over a year ago. He knew how to handle large vehicles and to gear down while descending hills. And he knew the ins and outs of air brake systems equipped on the big trucks, his father said.
“Chris drove about every wheel that rolled,” the father said.
