Woman impaled by nail in crash
BY JOHN BURMAN
The Hamilton Spectator
Firefighters worked for half an hour today to gently rescue a woman impaled by a porch nail after her car crashed under a Beach Strip home.
Bernice Mastej barely had time to get to her front door to see what hit her home when a passerby thrust a six-month-old baby boy into her arms, explaining he came from the car under her house.
Bernice, 75 and a grandmother of six, knew what to do.
“I put my arms around him and took his jacket off and just loved him up,” she said.
Police said the crash occurred about 4:30 p.m. when the woman’s car, northbound on Eastport Drive, went out of control and slammed across several curbs and grass medians, part of the Beach Strip and Bernice’s front lawn before hitting the house.
A woman, who refused to give her name, said she pulled the baby’s detachable carrier from its lock in a car seat and took him into the house.
“He was buckled in right. That saved his life,” she said before leaving.
Firefighters found the car under Frank and Bernice Mastej’s front porch, buried halfway up to its roof.
A number of porch floorboards had smashed through the windshield.
A firefighter and a police officer — who’d crawled into the wreckage to care for the woman — found that a nail in one of the boards had pierced the driver’s face and she was pinned in the car.
Firefighters moved porch furniture above the car and set about sawing railings and floor boards to get at the woman while others began removing the roof of the car.
When they got to the board bearing the protruding nail, it was decided a paramedic would cut the nail so the woman could be freed.
The woman was then taken by ambulance to Hamilton General Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
The baby was taken to McMaster Children’s Hospital to be checked out.
“He is a good baby,” said Frank Mastej, a retired Spectator pressman who runs his Golf Tech custom club shop behind his home. “He’s alert but he hasn’t cried at all.
“I was back there and didn’t hear a thing but Bernice, she was right in the front room and ‘Pow.’ ”
Bernice, said she had “no idea on earth” what hit and shook the house.
By the time she got to the front door, a woman was coming up the long steps with a baby.
When she was handed the baby, Bernice, who had three children of her own, gave him a quick once over and decided he seemed to be OK, but she was glad he went to hospital for a check.
“He is a sweet little thing. I hope some day he will come back and visit us.”
Police said last night the crash is still under investigation.
jburman@thespec.com
905-526-2469
