“All of a sudden something came through the windshield and smashed me in the head,” Maki said. “It was a bowling ball. It knocked me out completely.”
Ted and Dawn Maki of Missoula have been running a dedicated U.S. mail route for the past 10 years, driving truck between Missoula and Philadelphia every week.
But early Sunday morning, Ted Maki, 54, was about 20 hours into the trip heading eastbound on Interstate 90 when someone dropped a 10-pound bowling ball from an overpass in Fairmont, Minn., 150 miles southwest of Minneapolis. The ball crashed through the windshield of the couple's tractor-trailer, which was traveling 65 mph, and knocked Ted unconscious.
While Dawn rested in the sleeper compartment, the truck swerved into the median, crossed both westbound lanes and a county frontage road, crashed through a fence and finally came to a stop in a cornfield a half-mile down the road, Maki said.
Investigators have not located any suspects, but told Maki a car might have been idling on the bridge when he passed underneath. Officials are basing that determination on a pool of condensation on the overpass, apparently from a vehicle's air conditioner.
Ted Maki was airlifted to a hospital in Rochester, Minn., where he was treated for a broken cheekbone and released Monday morning.
“This type of behavior is not a prank, it's assault, and can be disastrous,” Jacalyn Sticha, a Highway Patrol spokeswoman, told the Associated Press. “This could have been much more tragic.”
Although Dawn Maki was tossed around inside the sleeper compartment, she was not injured.
“When we finally came to a stop, Dawn climbed out through all the junk, unzipped the curtain and saw me slumped over in the driver's seat,” Ted Maki said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “There was a huge hole in the windshield and glass everywhere. At first she thought my head had hit the windshield, but my seat belt was on, and then blood came gushing out of my right ear. Of course, she was pretty freaked out, then she saw a ball sitting in the passenger footwell. She touched it and realized it's a bowling ball.”
The revelation was so incredible that executives with NBC's “Today Show” contacted the couple after initial news reports and requested an exclusive interview.
On Wednesday morning, after buying new clothes to wear on national television, the Makis awoke in a penthouse suite in Sioux Falls, S.D. - courtesy of the network - and sat down for a live interview.
“All we had to wear was our trucking clothes to go to Philly and back,” Maki said. “Now CNN wants to do a phone interview on Thursday, and ‘Good Morning America' wanted to interview us, but we turned them down.”
The shock of the tragedy still hasn't gone away for Ted and Dawn, but the couple knows the outcome could have been much worse.
“We could have been killed,” Ted said. “We almost hit another driver who could have been killed. But God was looking out for everyone.”
The couple has been dealt a bout of bad luck over the years, and in the wake of the bowling ball incident, hopes for a long break from chaos.
In 1989, Ted Maki survived a bone marrow transplant, then kicked prostate cancer last year. In January, he had a stroke while sitting in his parked truck. Several years ago, Dawn Maki was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a bilateral mastectomy.
“So we've been through the mill, but we're still here,” he said. “We plan on staying in Missoula for a while, unless the phone rings and Oprah wants us to pay her a visit. I'll go see Oprah anytime she wants.”
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