As Caitlyn Bromley hugged the concrete curb, her first thought came slowly, methodically:
“Did that just happen? This isn’t a movie. You were just hit by a car. You. Just. Got. Hit. By. A. Car.”
Her next thought came as the silver vehicle sped away, leaving Bromley alone and injured, without her cellphone, a mile from her own vehicle with no other human being in sight:
“She’s driving away. I got hit by a car. She’s leaving me. She’s. Driving. Away.”
Bromley lay at the intersection of Bunker Lane and Wexford Boulevard in Stow for a full 10 minutes, afraid to move, watching her leg swell.
Seared into her mind was the image of the driver. Young. Blonde. A cellphone in her hands. Panic in her eyes as the two women briefly looked at each other through the windshield before Bromley’s body slid off the hood of her car and into the street.
That was four years ago.
Bromley still trains for the Akron Marathon on the trail that runs behind Stow-Munroe Falls High School — just as she did that day — but she avoids crossing the intersection where she could have lost her life.
Her daily routine takes her close enough to glance at it, though. And she does glance at it. She can’t help it. The memory of that day still haunts her. The impact of the car. The feel of the cold pavement beneath her prone body. And the face of the unidentified woman who abandoned her.
Delayed start
Bromley, 27, decided she was a runner in the seventh grade. She had resisted it up until then. Her dad was a runner and always encouraged her, but she had no interest in following in his footsteps until she tasted victory at an elementary school event.
“After that race, my dad said, ‘You’re joining track and field next year!’ ” and she didn’t argue with him. “Turns out, I was gifted in running and I actually enjoyed it.”
She ran track and cross country for four years at Stow-Munroe Falls High School and two years at Heidelberg University in Tiffin before deciding competitive running wasn’t her future and she needed to focus on her career as an athletic trainer. But she continued to run for fun, mostly in local 5k races, then half marathons. She’d only run in a full marathon once, a college “bonding” event with friends. The 2012 Akron Marathon was to be only her second attempt at that distance.
Distracted disaster
It was late May when she parked her car, put in her earbuds, and starting padding down the path behind Stow-Munroe Falls High School. She’d measured an 8-mile course for herself, which required her to leave the trail for the length of a single street before returning to the off-road path.
As she approached the four-way stop at Wexford and Bunker, she didn’t see any cars near the intersection. Nice, she thought. She wouldn’t need to break pace.
She stepped into the intersection. From the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of silver, but not in time to stop. The car’s passenger side smacked her. She flew onto the hood briefly, long enough to see the wide eyes of the young woman in the driver’s seat.
“She wasn’t speeding,” Bromley said, “but it was a stop, and she wasn’t slowing for the stop. When I was on the hood of her car, I saw the phone in her hand. I don’t know what she was doing, but she was definitely paying more attention to her cellphone than anything going on in the neighborhood.”
And then, without a word, the woman pulled away and drove off from where Bromley’s body lay on the pavement.
Bromley was stunned, too stunned at first to feel anything. But soon enough, she started to feel pain, and then panic.
“I could see the bruise on my leg, and it was swelling up huge, but I started thinking, ‘What if it isn’t just my leg? What if something else is wrong and I can’t see it? What if I die here?’ I went to a dark, dark place,” she said.
What finally motivated her to get off the ground was thinking about her mom. They’d had a fight that morning. All she could think about was getting to her cellphone locked in her car a mile away so she could hear her mother’s voice.
Even today, she can’t explain why she didn’t hobble to a house to ask for help.
Instead, she limped, dazed and in pain, the full mile to her car as the sun began to set.
She said the police spent a couple of weeks going door to door in the neighborhood, the intersection being in a residential area that suggested the driver might live nearby. And Bromley’s mom staked out the site a few times, hoping to catch a glimpse of a silver car with a young, blonde driver on her way home at the end of the day.
It took four months for the swelling in Bromley’s leg to decrease enough for an MRI to see the torn meniscus in her knee, and a year to complete two surgeries to repair it.
But in many ways, the mental and emotional damage was so much worse.
“Every time I would close my eyes, I would see the car. I would go through the accident all over again. For months, sleep was almost impossible. It was like it was looped on a replay,” she said.
“And all the time I’m losing sleep, I’m thinking this person who hit me is probably sleeping just fine,” she said.
Bromley had to stop working for several weeks, had to find a way to get her student loan payments delayed, had to wait almost two years to run again.
“I was an active 23-year-old and I wanted my life back,” she said.
An emotional finish
Then in 2014, she ran the Akron Marathon’s half marathon. In 2015, she ran the full marathon. Both times, she finished the race in tears.
“Every finish is such an emotional experience for me now,” she said.
On Saturday, she’ll run the half again. She lost some training time because of a career change.
But even now, she’s often “plagued with mental doubts” that she’ll ever be the runner she once was — something she is reminded of every time she trains without doing special exercises to appease her “angry knee.”
“I want to be the bigger person and say I forgive her, and I count my blessings for not being as bad off as other people I read about who have been injured or killed” by distracted drivers, Bromley said. “At times I’d get mad and say ‘How dare you? How could you not care enough about me to not pay attention to what you were doing? To not stop and help me after you hit me?”
But she fears forgiveness will elude her until the woman who hit her comes forward.
“I saw the panic in her eyes. I know she was scared. Fine. Be scared, but don’t drive away. Own up to it,” she said.
“I kept hoping someone would go to the police and say, ‘I was terrified, I was truly terrified, but I’m the person who did this,’” she said. “That’s all I wanted.”
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.