Former My Chemical Romance member Frank Iero has given his first interview about the near-fatal Sydney traffic incident he, his bandmates, manager and publicist were involved in last October.
Iero, his brother-in-law and guitarist Evan Nestor, his drummer Matt Olsson, his manager Paul Clegg and his publicist made their way to the Twitter office in Sydney’s CBD on 13th October 2016, and were unloading their van out the front of the building when a bus collided with them. The accident led the band to cancel the final show of their 2016 Aussie tour in Sydney.
Now, in an interview with MTV, Iero has described the accident in detail, adding that he thinks it’s “incredible” that they’re “all still alive”.
“I can remember every second, every action, every sound,” Iero says. “I had this little briefcase pedal board that I had been carrying around with me. I put that down and I turned around to say to Evan and Paul, ‘I think I’m just going to take the tuner out of here.’ I said, ‘I think’ — that’s all I got out of my mouth.”
Iero says the impact from the bus felt like “being tackled from behind”.
“I ended up underneath the bumper of this massive vehicle,” he says. “From my vantage point, I could only see Evan, and I could hear Paul. I thought whoever I couldn’t see or hear had to be dead, and if they weren’t dead yet, then we all would be soon.”
The bus is believed to have dragged Iero along the curb for about three metres, before coming to a stop. At that point, the band’s publicist supposedly moved their van forward to release Iero, Nestor and Clegg.
Iero says that when Nestor fell down onto the ground and said “I can’t feel my legs”, he put his coat under his head and held him. “That’s when I saw the puddle of blood coming from Paul [Clegg]’s injuries. It was the brightest red I’d ever seen. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from,” Iero says.
A police officer nearby witnessed the crash, and immediately tied a tourniquet around Clegg’s leg, which may have saved his life. Iero, Nestor and Clegg were admitted to hospital, where they’d stay for two weeks before returning to the US for further treatment.
Iero believes he survived the crash because of “an enormous rucksack” he was wearing at the time. “There’s no doubt in my mind that it saved me,” he says. “The way I got hit, it hooked on underneath the bumper and lodged me between the curb and the bus.”
Iero also says the back door of the van “accordioned back after the hit” and broke the impact of the crash to some degree.
“I don’t even know what would’ve happened. It’s incredible to me that we’re all still alive. No one that witnessed the accident thought that we would be,” he says.
In the aftermath of the crash, Iero says he tends to think that even bad things happen “for some reason”.
The Sydney bus crash took place shortly before Frank Iero And The Patience released their latest album, Parachutes, and Iero says the timing was pretty incredible.
“I wish I could say that it was a tragic experience that’s now a positive thing because I’m still here,” he says. “It’s funny to have written a record like Parachutes [and] to have something like this happen. You can’t write that shit.”
Iero says he and his band are looking forward to going out on another tour in 2017.
Bus and van crash on Park Street. Three injured. #sydney pic.twitter.com/tXDzCYI1DT
— Brenden Wood (@BrendenWood) October 13, 2016
