What should have been a minor fender bender, turned into a nightmare for an Atlanta man, leaving him blind in his left eye.
Fox 10 News reports that in the spring of 2017, Atlanta city electrician Abdul Jones was on his way home from work when another vehicle sideswiped his 2005 Cadillac sedan. The impact caused the side view mirror to shatter and sent shards of broken glass directly into Jones’ eye.
The broken mirror caused significant damage to the cornea, pupil, retina, and lens of Jones’ eye. The other motorist who had caused the incident stopped to help Abdul Jones get to Grady Trauma Center he underwent emergency surgery.
Dr. Yousuf Khalifa, Chief of Ophthalmology at Grady hospital performed the surgery, but the damage to Jones’ eye was severe. Dr. Khalifa told Fox News, “When you have glass that penetrates the eye, it can be very irregular, the laceration. So, the surgery tends to be a little more challenging.”
Jones has undergone 5 additional surgeries to his eye over the past two years. He is able to see shadows out of the eye now, but there is no real vision due to the trauma he suffered from the shattered mirror.
This incident wasn’t the first time that Dr. Khalifa had seen a similar injury to the eye. In a period of just two months, two other people had been brought to Grady Trauma Center with similar injuries to the eye received when a side-view mirror was struck in an accident. Each of them had been riding in their vehicles with the window down. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) does not require that the glass used in the manufacture of mirrors be laminated.
Dr. Khalifa recently submitted the Journal of the American Medical Association Ophthalmology about what happened to Jones and the other two patients. He believes that more research and changing the safety standards for the glass used in manufacturing rearview mirrors can help to make them less of a risk to drivers in an accident.
