ARLINGTON – The last words DaNielle Anderson said to her boyfriend before he stormed out of their house during a fight after midnight Saturday were “I hate you, too.”
A couple of hours later, an emergency room nurse was on the phone.
Cody Weaver was hurt. Anderson needed to get to Providence Everett Medical Center immediately.
When her boyfriend of one year left their house after midnight Saturday, he started walking toward a Shell gas station a few blocks away. Weaver, 23, wanted to visit a friend who worked there.
He never arrived.
A pickup truck hit Weaver as he walked along Smokey Point Boulevard. The driver sped away without calling 911, according to Snohomish County Sheriff’s Deputy Rich Niebusch.
At 2:19 a.m., someone driving by spotted Weaver’s shoes in the middle of the road and slowed down, Niebusch said. The person saw the injured man on the side of the road and phoned police.
An ambulance sped Weaver to the hospital. He had a broken neck, a punctured kidney, road rash and six broken bones in his left leg. A large wound on his head required eight staples, Weaver said.
Slivers of green paint were found on his clothes. Investigators believe they belong to the truck that hit Weaver, most likely a late-’90s Dodge Ram.
Weaver doesn’t remember the accident. He recalls walking on the shoulder of the road, which doesn’t have sidewalks. The next thing he remembers is someone holding his head while he asked that person to call his girlfriend.
When Anderson arrived at the hospital, her boyfriend was undergoing a CAT scan and she couldn’t go to his side. She was terrified.
For Weaver’s family, it was an awful replay of another family tragedy. On Nov. 11, 2001 – exactly five years earlier – his younger brother Austin was barely clinging to life at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. He’d been seriously injured in a car crash near Arlington.
When Austin Weaver, now 21, heard about his brother’s accident, he headed straight to the hospital. He didn’t have a car, so he began walking from Machias before someone picked him up and offered him a ride, said the youngest Weaver brother, Dakota, 19.
“I try to act like it’s not going on, but I’m hurting on the inside,” Dakota Weaver said as he sat by his brother’s hospital bed earlier this week. “It’s hard because Cody is always the strong one of us brothers. We all look up to him – and to see him hurt, it’s really hard.”
Up until a few months ago, Cody Weaver made a living as a laborer. He lost that job and with it, his medical insurance. He’s not sure how he’s going to pay his hospital bills, but that’s the least of his worries.
Weaver, Anderson and investigators want to find the driver who hit him. Niebusch asked anyone with information about the accident to call the sheriff’s office tip line at 425-388-3845.
“A lot of the time what happens is people will talk about these things to friends or neighbors,” Niebusch said. “If anybody knows anything, call us. The responsible thing is for the person who struck this young man to come forward and take accountability for their actions.”
Anderson also wants the person who stopped to help her boyfriend to come forward.
She wants to thank that person for saving her boyfriend’s life.
The accident has left a lot of uncertainty in the lives of Weaver and Anderson.
She hasn’t seen Weaver on his feet since he walked out during the argument Saturday. It is unclear when he’ll be able to walk again. Snowboarding, one of Weaver’s favorite activities, is out of the question indefinitely. And they don’t know where they’ll spend Thanksgiving. Anderson had planned on cooking dinner for Weaver and her 9-year-old daughter, Selena, but with Weaver in the hospital and so many family members in town to see him, they’re reconsidering.
Through their ordeal, however, one thing has become painfully clear to the couple.
They say they’ll never part on such bad terms again.
When Anderson finally saw her boyfriend in the emergency room Saturday morning, he was bloody and delirious, but he wouldn’t take his eyes off her.
He kept repeating, “I love you,” Anderson recalled.
And her first words to him were “I love you, too.”
Reporter Kaitlin Manry: 425-339-3292 or kmanry@heraldnet.com.
Information needed
If you have information about the accident, call the sheriff’s office tip line at 425-388-3845.
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