BATON ROUGE — Baton Rouge Police Officer Dur’Ahnjae Vessell is usually the one responding to emergencies. But on Nov. 1, he found himself in one.
Officer Vessell was on duty just before 7 a.m. when he had to pull over on I-12. “It had to have been something very important for me to stop on the side of the interstate,” he said. “I rarely stop on the interstate. Either something had failed or I needed to grab at that very moment, especially if it was on my driver’s side floorboard.”
Vessell doesn’t remember what caused him to pull over, but recalls the last thing he saw. “The last thing I actually do remember seeing is a set of bright lights. I didn’t think anything of it, just someone passing me with their brights on,” he recalled.
But that wasn’t the case. Instead, an 18-wheeler crashed into Vessell and his police car. “That’s when I felt the impact and then it felt like I was spinning around forever,” he said. “When I actually felt my car come to a stop, I was just sitting there. I’m like, ‘All right, gotta call it in’.”
Vessell soon realized reaching BRPD and calling his own crash in wasn’t going to be easy. “I tried to key up the radio, but I couldn’t hear anything,” he said. “Then I realized that I couldn’t hear anything at all. I can’t hear cars passing by. I can’t hear the radio. I don’t hear any noises.”…