Chicago White Sox fan describes bizarre episode that left him dangling through sunroof after a hit-and-run incident at Sox Park

When Chuck Janczy hopped on the Green Line to Guaranteed Rate Field on Tuesday night he was hoping to watch a decent game between the Chicago White Sox and Texas Rangers.

As a longtime Sox fan with a partial season ticket package in Section 109, it has been a difficult season for the 64-year-old Evanston resident, and like many others he has come to expect the worst from this year’s team.

But what Janczy didn’t expect was to wind up in a hospital with fractured ribs after being hit by a car, or falling headfirst through the car’s sunroof after impact, or going on a brief trip down the Dan Ryan Expressway during a pursuit of the hit-and-run driver by Chicago police that ended with a crash, or having a gun drawn on him minutes later as the driver was being arrested.

“The whole thing is bizarre,” Janczy said Saturday in a phone interview.

Janczy said he was walking across 35th Street at Shields Avenue to meet friends before the game Tuesday when he was one of four people injured in the hit-and-run accident.

Condelarious Garcia, the 20-year-old driver of the car, faces four counts of aggravated reckless driving, along with misdemeanor driving on a suspended license and three traffic citations for the incident. He was held in jail in lieu of a $20,000 bail.

According to Assistant State’s Attorney Sarah Dale-Schmidt, one of the four victims suffered a traumatic brain injury and remained “unresponsive and intubated.” Janczy, who works on cloud-based computing for IBM, felt fortunate to escape without a more serious injury.

“I chalk up the fact I ended up in the sunroof as the reason why I wasn’t more severely injured,” he said. “I didn’t hit my head and obviously have no brain damage. I have lots of bruises and fractures, but that stuff will heal. Some of the other victims obviously have more serious, long-term problems.”

Janczy said he was later told by police that the driver had been stopped on 35th Street by traffic administrators who were allowing fans to cross about a half-hour before the start of the game. But the driver allegedly grew upset about having to wait and pulled around some cars by going partially on the sidewalk, heading eastbound on 35th.

“When he was doing that maneauver, someone in the car was going, ‘No, don’t do that, there are people walking,’” Janczy said. “He just didn’t listen. He was going pretty fast when he hit me because he hit me hard.”

For reasons unknown, the city has never considered putting a stop light at the corner of 35th and Shields, or shutting the street down during games. Fans crossing the busy street from Lots B and C have been dodging traffic on game days for years.

Janczy said he suffered seven fractured ribs, a spiral fracture in his right tibia and three small fractures in his spine, forcing him to walk with a cane for now. The bruising and swelling remained as well, but he said that was “slowly getting better.”

Janczy couldn’t recall being on the hood or sliding up the windshield and through the sunroof as it sped off and hanging upside-down.

“It all happened so fast, and the impact, it was such a shock to be hit,” he said. “All of a sudden I come to (in the car) I wasn’t unconscious, but I realized where I was — upside-down in the car and looking at the inside of the car.

“There was at least one person in the back. They were talking among themselves, and one person asked me, I believe twice, if I was OK. I was kind of like, ‘I don’t know. I think so.’ ”

When the car crashed after a police maneuver, Janczy was the last one left inside when a cop approached the vehicle. He said one of them “points his gun at me and is like, ‘Get out of the car, get out of the car.’ ”

Fortunately, another cop told him Janczy was a victim, not a suspect.

A Sox representative reached out to Janczy afterward to see if he was OK. He told her he was.

Janczy said the accident wouldn’t stop him from going to future Sox games, though he conceded he dumped his tickets for Sunday’s game against the Boston Red Sox.

“I sold them online at a loss,” he said. “There’s no way I could go right now. I will go back, maybe against the St. Louis Cardinals (in July).”

His fandom didn’t take a hit. Janczy called himself the product of a “mixed marriage,” with a mother who was a die-hard Sox fan and a father who was a die-hard Cubs fan. He eventually gravitated to the Sox and never looked back.

In spite of the Sox’s struggles the last two seasons, he does not consider himself a typical ticked-off fan.

“Frustrated maybe,” he said. “I wish they would do something different, because whatever they’re doing, obviously it isn’t working.”

()

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/4yrJc0N