Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 8, 1993 TAG: 9312080218
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ED SHAMY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Jerald Craig of Roanoke was northbound in his Jeep on the Webber Highway.
Kathy Guy was in the bedroom of her Maple Avenue home.
"I'm doing my morning thing - reading the newspaper, drinking my coffee - and I hear this god-awful thunk on the side of the house. I screamed - involuntarily," Guy said. "I'm not a screamer."
As fate would have it, the god-awful thunk thunked just as Guy spied a mouse in the bedroom.
"I'm thinking, `Where're the cats?' I was more upset at the cats," she said.
It is unclear whether Kathy Guy held the mouse or the cats responsible for the god-awful thunk, but eventually she did look out the second-story window to investigate the thunk.
She didn't see a half-ton mouse.
"I look down, and I see a tire in the garlic, mag wheel and all," she said. The garlic grows in her garden; the mag wheel lay on the garlic.
Two men were prowling around the street, shielded from Guy's garlic and the mag wheel by a wooden privacy fence.
The mouse, the garlic, the god-awful thunk - it had all become too much for Kathy Guy, who just wanted to start her day with a cup of java and a glance at the headlines. She went outside and discovered a skid mark up the wall of her house and a hole in the shingles about 12 feet off the ground next to the bathroom window.
Guy called the police to report the mag wheel in her garlic.
"He wanted to know if there was a car attached," she said.
The cop on the phone told her to just leave it in the yard; if the other three wheels or the owner were found, police would be in touch.
Guy hung up.
The phone rang almost immediately. It was the cop. Apparently, a man - that would be Jerald Craig - was on the Webber Highway looking for his tire, and would it be OK if he and the police officer visited Kathy Guy's garlic bed to see if the tire there could be positively identified as Craig's?
It was.
The front driver-side wheel had come off at highway speed and had, in a quarter-mile, crossed a grass median and two lanes of interstate traffic; rolled down alongside an entrance ramp to the highway; crossed two lanes of Franklin Road, a concrete median, two more lanes of Franklin Road and a highway exit ramp; hit a curb; whistled over Kathy Guy's fence; soared atop the garlic; shot through a hemlock tree; and god-awful thunked into the house before rebounding into the garlic.
It wasn't the most incredible tire story of all time, but it was surely this valley's most amazing driver-less tire journey of the day.
Jerald Craig wasn't hurt, but $1,500 in damage was done to his Jeep, and he was ticketed by police for defective equipment.
"I looked at him," Guy said, "and said, `My morning's been pretty amusing, but you're looking like you've had a really bad day.'"
Kathy Guy's cats slept through the entire incident.
The mouse remains at large.
by CNB