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Rescuers Meet Fellow Hockey Fans They Saved From 110 Freeway Crash

The rescuers were coming home from an LA Kings game when they noticed the mangled truck

Glenn and Michele Reskusich couldn't do anything but embrace each other and pray when they saw headlights coming toward them as they were trapped in their overturned truck on the 110 Freeway.

"This is it, this is it," Michele Reskusich recalled thinking. "It's over with. We thought we were going to die."

But the couple was rescued. Three people managed to pull them out of their mangled truck just moments before it was hit once again by an oncoming truck in Carson, about 16 miles south of the Staples Center, where they were coming from a Los Angeles Kings game.

It took Reskusich two weeks and a plea on Facebook for help finding her rescuers before hearing from Anthony Palma, Nicole Duran and Jake Sullivan, the trio that Reskusich says saved her and her husband's lives.

The Reskusich family and the trio — dressed in Kings jerseys — had an emotional reunion Wednesday in Torrance.

The couple, from Lomita, was driving home on the southbound 110 Freeway from an Kings hockey game on Oct. 25 when three vehicles, which Michele Reskusich said were street racing, zoomed by and caused a horrific, chain-reaction crash that flipped over their truck. 

The couple, trapped in their vehicle, was struck by another oncoming truck.

"I think we would have been dead," Michele Reskusich said.

But their prayers were answered when a group of good Samaritans who happened to be driving back from the same game stopped to pull Michele and Glen from the wreck.

"We saw some gas on the floor, so we didn't want to keep them in the car, so we had to drag them out through the passenger side window," Palma said. 

"I did panic, but it was more about getting them away from it," said Duran, who was in tears when she hugged Michele Reskusich.

Their meeting was made possible thanks to Reskusich's post on Facebook. Palma's uncle commented on the post saying the young man and his friends were the rescuers, and he'd try to get them in touch. Then Reskusich got a call from the man's mother.

"From what I understand he is a very humble young man, and was accompanied by three of his friends," Reskusich wrote in a Facebook comment after getting the call.

She said she was invited by the Kings to dinner and a game, and wants to do something to recognize her rescuers, possibly at a Kings match — their bond now strengthened by their mutual love for hockey.

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