Over two weeks ago, on Sept. 20, Rowan student Remus Creanga broke his leg in a motorcycle accident on 322 Rowan Boulevard.
Sitting at the traffic light off of Girard Rd., Creanga stopped behind the car in front of him when the crossing guard let traffic go almost immediately after he stopped.
“With the bike, when you’re in first gear, you have to let off the clutch and hit the throttle at the same time. If you do it wrong you either stall and it will sit there dead or you jump– and in my case, it just jumped,” Creanga said. “It [the bike] just kind of took off on me. I knew I was going to have to go and bail on the grass or hit the pole and I remember going towards the pole and thinking ‘I’m definitely hitting this thing.’”
He and the motorcycle both did multiple flips with Creanga landing on the grass on the other side of the road.
“Luckily, I hit it and kind of rolled off. I landed on my back and kind of kept rolling. My helmet popped off, but it was just hard grass so I just kept rolling,” Creanga said.
Creanga was taken to the hospital almost immediately following the accident with some bruising, an open wound and a break to his tibia and fibula. Between Thursday and Friday of that week, he was taken in to have surgery on his leg.
“I had surgery. They had to put a rod in my tibia and it’s screwed in. I went in on Tuesday when it happened and had a cleaning for an open wound and they sterilized it that day,” Creanga said.
Creanga is now at home recovering with a cast and walker.
“I think it’s like six weeks to fully heal, but right now I have a walker to help me walk around because this cast is not made for walking, so I need it for balance,” said Creanga.
Creanga, having just acquired his motorcycle license last summer, explained the vehicle was his brother’s old motorcycle, a 650cc. The day of the accident was his second day driving it on campus.
“Oh it’s totaled,” Creanga said regarding the bike.
However, the broken bike is the least of his concerns. When asked about any repercussions following the incident, Creanga explained that the police report stated him in the wrong with charges of reckless driving and passing on the right, as reported by a witness.
“The witness was the guy I was behind. He told the cop I was trying to pop a wheelie and trying to go around him, which is not at all what I was trying to do,” said Creanga.
Creanga will now attend virtual court in defense against these claims, but when asked about their legitimacy, he labeled the claims as false.
“The thing was, I turned behind him right off Girard right next to the train tracks, so if I wanted to go around him, I could have gone past ten cars,” said Creanga. “If I had passed on the left I would have hit every single car that was backed up and probably three to four students.”
Not long after hitting the pole, an ambulance and police officer on the scene rushed to Creanga’s aid.
“The ambulance was right there and they saw me hit it, so they showed up before the cop, but the cop was also the crossing guard, so he showed up, too. They were there in like 30 seconds,” Creanga said.
However, in terms of schoolwork, Creanga has decided to medically withdraw from classes for this semester and as of Monday, Oct. 3, 2022, his withdrawal was confirmed.
Additionally, he had been given a scholarship from the university, and– in order to withdraw from classes and maintain his scholarship– Creanga classified the withdrawal as being for medical reasons.
“I medically withdrew because honestly I’ve been wanting to take a gap semester anyway and going online wasn’t an option because of my classes,” Creanga said. “It was either I have to go back or I have to withdraw, and I had no clue about how quickly I would recover and I would be a month behind.”
As Oct. 5, there has been no confirmation of the charges in the police report, but Creanga maintains the point that he was not in any way driving recklessly and that this was an accident.
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