This still image from video provided by NBC Boston shows wreckage after a vehicle suddenly accelerated at an auto auction and struck several people before it crashed through a wall of the building Wednesday in Billerica, Massachusetts.
AUBURN — On the three-hour drive back from Massachusetts on Wednesday, Kevin Gosselin prayed that a man fighting for his life would pull through.
“I was crying most of the way home,” the 53-year-old Auburn man said.
Gosselin, owner of Real Deal Auto on Washington Street, was on a used car buying excursion in Billerica when a Jeep Cherokee sped through the crowded car auction, leaving three dead and 13 hurt.
Gosselin didn’t see it happen, he said, but he heard the impact and witnessed the hell that followed.
“I heard the bang and I ran right outside,” Gosselin said. “There were people laying everywhere. It was horrible. Horrible.”
Two people were dead at the scene. A third man was badly hurt, but there were signs that he might make it.
“He was laying there in a puddle of blood,” Gosselin said. “A lady officer flipped him right over and started doing chest compressions. We saw his arm move and we were hopeful. They brought him back three or four times. I was praying to God, right there. I was thinking, ‘Come on, buddy. Come on.'”
Driving back to Auburn later, Gosselin held out hope that the man had survived —that there would be that one bright spot in an otherwise dark day.
“My son texted me when I was just about back to Maine,” Gosselin said. “He said, ‘Dad, that third guy passed away.'”
Later Wednesday, it remained unknown whether the death toll would climb higher. More than a dozen had been taken to hospitals, according to news sources. Their conditions were unknown.
Gosselin described a chaotic scene, with strewn bodies, confusion and police and media helicopters circling overhead.
“I lost my breakfast when I went outside and I saw what I saw,” he said. “I hugged the guy next to me. I put my head on his shoulder. I didn’t even know the guy, but I was just so distraught.”
Back at home seven hours after the crash, Gosselin said he was still shaken by what he had seen. He was haunted by the memory of that unidentified victim — who had been revived so many times only to die anyway — and by those who had been killed on impact.
“It was really just a terrible scene,” Gosselin said.
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