After everything he’d been through, the collision that sent Harold Hamon to hospital didn’t seem so serious to his family.
Over the last 10 years, Hamon, the 57-year-old owner of Hamon’s Towing & Recovery in Langley, had dealt with diabetes, the amputation of his right leg, kidney failure and the aftereffects of open heart surgery that left him clinically dead for just over four minutes.
A shattered hip was not a small matter, but it didn’t seem like anything the resilient Hamon couldn’t recover from.
Hamon suffered the injury when his blue Ford F350 pickup was hit by a white Chevrolet panel van around 9 a.m. Friday (March 11) on the Langley Bypass east of the 200 Street intersection.
According to police, the van was making an illegal left-hand turn onto the bypass when the collision occurred.
The force of the crash sent the Ford into a ditch, injuring Hamon and his passenger.
The first thing Hamon did was reach for his cellphone.
He was still inside the damaged truck when he called his brother.
“Ron, you better get down here,” he said.
“A guy just cut me off. I’m cut pretty bad.”
Eyewitness Tressa Japp saw the blue Ford F350 pickup truck spin out of control and land in a ditch.
“The smoke started billowing out of the front of the [Ford] truck,” said Japp, a First Aid instructor from Boston Bar who rushed to assist the injured occupants of the pickup.
“The driver was more lucid than the passenger,” Japp told The Times.
“They both had serious head trauma.”
Both men were rushed to hospital by ambulance.
When Hamon’s sister Lorraine went to see him in hospital, she said he was in considerable pain, and fretting about the fate of the other people involved.
“I didn’t kill anybody, did I?” he asked.
In fact, the driver of the van walked away from the crash and Hamon’s passenger was treated and released.
“You don’t need to worry,” Lorraine told her brother.
It was, the family says, typical of Hamon to worry about others more than himself.
They describe him as a hard-working big-hearted person who would tow people even if they were broke, telling them to pay him when they could.
“He never left anyone high and dry,” says brother Ron, who occasionally drove for Hamon’s towing company.
Hamon, one of 11 kids, spent almost his entire life living and working in the town where he was born.
He never married, but he had many nieces and nephews, and they adored their uncle, who liked to build slick, fast cars and trucks.
His pride and joy was the 800 horsepower street-legal 1964 Ranchero with the black cherry paint job.
There was also a bright blue 1980 Chevy short-box pickup that he built with his brother Terry.
Most of all, Hamon loved his job. He liked to keep working.
He would go out in all kinds of weather, even working Christmas Day.
About 10 years ago, a dropped dolly caused a foot injury that turned into an infection and led to the amputation of his right leg.
It barely slowed him down.
He did need an assistant to help him hook up vehicles, and every now and then, his artificial leg would fall off, likely because he was losing weight.
Hamon would simply put the errant metal limb back on and carry on like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
The failed attempt to quell the infection in his leg with antibiotics is believed responsible for the kidney failure that required dialysis treatments four times a week.
About 14 months ago, Hamon underwent open heart surgery, and his heart stopped beating for about four minutes after the operation.
He survived and quickly returned to work, with a doctor’s note that allowed him to drive without a seatbelt post-surgery.
A week before the crash, Hamon was discharged from hospital where he’d been treated for pneumonia.
He was back at work half an hour later.
Hamon died Sunday morning, just hours before he was scheduled to undergo surgery on his hip.
The family said an autopsy has been ordered to determine the cause of death.
Meanwhile, the police investigation of the crash continues.
Both vehicles have been seized and will undergo mechanical inspections.
Langley RCMP said charges are being contemplated.
