VALDOSTA — It was a nightmare.

It hardly seemed real — but it was. 

The semi truck barreled through the red light and plowed into Mike Black’s car, smashing glass and crunching the metal frame. He and his vehicle were no match against the gargantuan semi.

Black was on his way to pick up his son from daycare. Instead, he ended up in a coma that lasted 11 days.

The June 2015 accident in Live Oak, Fla., changed his life forever. The near-death crash left him with a traumatic brain injury

His neural wires were all mixed up and ripped to shreds, causing his temperature to suddenly spike to 104 degrees as his blood pressure violently fluctuated

He had to relearn everything.

“Imagine your brain is like a spider’s web,” he said. “Then imagine a hand just tearing the web down. That’s the best way I can describe it.

“It took me five tries just to swallow a glass of water.”

Now 46, Black’s body has healed but his mind has not. His wife, Kristie, said he is more like a teenager and that when he wants to do something, he can’t focus on anything else until he sees the action through.

Even though he is out of the hospital and back home, Mike said the scars on his brain remain and will never fade.

Thomas County resident Melanie Hester knows all too well the wounds a traffic accident can inflict on the mind.

In 1990, she was a college student driving to Valdosta on Highway 84 when the worst happened.

She ran off the road to the right and over-corrected while trying to regain control. Her car jerked the other way, flipped three times and landed upside down in the median.

A Brooks County resident found her and she ended up at South Georgia Medical Center with a traumatic brain injury that, like Black, plunged her into a coma for several days.

When Hester regained consciousness, her vision was damaged and her emotions rampant from the brain injury.

Her injuries even triggered a seizure while she was at the hospital, and when she returned home, she was like a newborn learning how to live.

“I couldn’t walk, bathe myself, and I didn’t really know my family,” said Hester, who is now the public relations coordinator for Thomas County Schools.

The side effects — mental and physical — lasted for years, and her brain is permanently marked with scar tissue.

Both Hester and Black credit God for their miraculous survival, after facing horrific accidents and managing to escape death.

But many others never make it out alive. In Georgia and Florida, traffic fatalities have spiked significantly in recent years.

Georgia’s 2014 count of 1,170 surged to 1,432 in 2015 and 1,561 in 2016, according to the Georgia Department of Transportation.

Florida recorded 3,158 traffic deaths in 2016, up from 2,941 in 2015 and 2,497 in 2014, according to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

GDOT’s Scott Higley attributes the rise to a buzzword that people have heard a lot lately, something that’s been at the center of public awareness campaigns all across the country in recent years: distracted driving.

“It seems to be the overwhelming cause of a number of these crashes, and it’s very alarming to us,” Higley said.

And it’s not just teenagers and inexperienced drivers falling prey to distracted-driving accidents. 

“We’re seeing alarming rates even among older drivers,” Higley said.

With rapidly advancing technology fueling the ability and desire to be more intensely connected to the digital world, possible distractions from smart cars and smartphones reach new frenzied heights with each passing day.

In the SunLight Project coverage area — Thomasville, Valdosta, Dalton, Tifton, Milledgeville and Moultrie, Ga., and Live Oak, Jasper and Mayo, Fla., along with the surrounding counties — law-enforcement agencies agree that distracted driving is one of the greatest dangers on the road.

Drunk driving, speeding and not wearing a seatbelt also top the list of contributing factors in accident-related deaths and injuries. 

Sometimes the traffic accident deaths occur in random locations, but there are definitely a few trouble spots where a large number of serious wrecks occur. 

The Danger Zones

Higley said GDOT sees deaths on all types of roads, from quiet rural routes to raging four-lane highways. There aren’t specific areas where deaths are more common, he said.

But certain communities in the region contain roads and intersections that are more deadly than others.

In the city of Dalton, the area on Chattanooga Road near and just north of the Tibbs Road intersection, at the northern edge of the city, may be the most frequent site of fatal accidents from the past few years, said Officer David Saylors of the Dalton Police Department.

That stretch of road not only has heavy traffic but also has a curve and a hill. It is near an interstate exit, so some of the drivers may not be aware of those features.

Dalton only had one traffic death in 2016, down from three in 2015. One person has died in a traffic accident this year so far.

Suwannee County in Florida has numerous fatality hot spots along Interstate 10, Sheriff Sam St. John said. There are more in Branford near U.S. Route 27 and State Road 247.

St. John blames an increase in overall traffic for the deaths at such spots.

Suwannee County saw 20 people die from traffic accidents in 2016, double from the 10 deaths reported in 2015.

Thomas County doesn’t have hot spots; rather, traffic fatalities happen “all over the map,” said Sgt. Tommy Peeples, Georgia State Patrol Post 12 commander.

“There is no one concentrated area,” he said, noting that fatal wrecks have occurred from rural roads to state highways.

For 2016, Thomas County had a total of nine fatal crashes. One crash claimed two lives.

The number of fatal crashes each year runs in the mid-20s for Post 12, which includes Thomas, Grady, Mitchell and Colquitt counties.

For 2016, a total of 25 fatal wrecks occurred between Post 12’s four counties. The number of fatal wrecks within Post 12’s area remained the same for 2015, and decreased from the 29 that occurred in 2014.

While no traffic fatalities were reported in 2016 within the city of Thomasville, the year netted a total of 1,484 accidents for the Thomasville City Police, crashes that ranged from major collisions to minor fender benders.

Lowndes County contains fatality hot spots all along Interstate 75 where the highway intersects other roads.

Road deaths in Lowndes have remained steady the past few years, with 13 in 2016 and 2015 and 12 in 2014.

The city of Valdosta also saw a plateau of traffic deaths in recent years, with five in 2016 and 2015 and three in 2014.

Cpl. Chris Kelch of Georgia State Patrol Post 31 said in addition to the interstate, his office is always working serious crashes on major roads in Lowndes, such as North Valdosta and Bemiss roads and anywhere that state routes and county roads intersect, such as Highway 122 and Cat Creek Road.

Regardless of the different places fatalities occur, law-enforcement agencies agree that the deaths are caused by a few common factors that pop up over and over again.

To discover more about traffic fatalities in the region, pick up the Tuesday, May 16, edition of The Thomasville Times-Enterprise.

The SunLight Project team of journalists who contributed to this report includes Thomas Lynn, Jordan Barela, Charles Oliver, Billy Hobbs, Alan Mauldin and Eve Guevara, along with the writer, team leader John Stephen.

To contact the team, email sunlightproject@gaflnews.com.