Car Accident Takes Pennsylvania Man's Life 50 Years After Sustaining Severe Head Injuries
It’s not every day that you can report a death 50 years after the fact. Sure, we have predictors that can calculate your mortality risk over the next five years, the ability to see the time of death up to 10 days and in what states you're most likely to die of a certain disease, but none of these come close to saying, “You’ll get hit by a car, survive 50 years, then die from the injuries sustained in that accident. But for one Pennsylvania man, that’s exactly what happened.
On July 8, 1965, 8-year-old Richard Albright was hit by a car. He suffered massive head injuries, broken legs, cuts and bruises, but he lived. On Aug. 24, 2015, Albright died from his injuries.
The (Allentown) Morning Call stated that its reporters who covered the story at the time said there was another boy who was hit by the car, but he only sustained minor injuries. The day after the accident, the newspaper reported that Albright was in critical condition but holding his own.
"We looked pretty far to see the chain of events," First Deputy Coroner Eric Minnich told The Morning Call. They found that "he was a quadriplegic secondary to this pedestrian accident. He was still receiving treatment for injuries received 50 years earlier."
Though it might seem strange that Albright didn’t succumb to his injuries when he was still a young boy, Miinich said it also meant that he never fully recovered from the accident, and it was only a matter of time before the injuries finally overcame him.
This isn’t the first Pennsylvania man to be hit by a car, survive, and live for another few decades. James Koplik of Bethlehem was struck by a car in New York in 1980, but the injuries sustained took until 2015 to kill him.
Both deaths of Albright and Koplik were ruled as accidents.