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"When I woke up in the ambulance, the paramedic took my helmet and shoved it in my face and said 'if you hadn't been wearing this we would be scraping your brains up off the pavement and you would be dead,'" Mai. Adam Travis recalled of a motorcycle ride that could have been his last.
Travis and Master Sgt. Lee Adkins were riding their motorcycles Jan. 15, 2012, in a group of five riders. The group was about 3 miles south of the City of Altus when Adkins collided with a tumbleweed at 70 mph and was thrown from his bike, which then caused Travis to crash.
"I saw huge tumbleweed out of the corner of my eye in the median," Adkins said. "I thought we were going to pass it because we were going 70 miles an hour and that is the last thing I remember."
"We didn't even break 5 miles out of town and a piece of tumbleweed comes from the opposite side of the road. The front rider pointed it out and everyone sees it," said Staff Sgt. Michael Fagan, the last rider in the group. "As soon as our lead rider passed the tumbleweed it rolled out into the road in front of Adkins. It looked like - from me seeing everything from the back - it hit his front wheel and exploded, and I'm thinking the tumbleweed slipped under his front wheel and brought it out. He goes down and then by reaction Travis locked up his brakes and went down."
'The last thing I remember seeing was this giant tumbleweed that was the size...