Robert Hanashiro / USA TODAY NETWORK
Jeremy Renner recalls in his new book the details of being nearly crushed to death by his 14,000-pound snow plow and the disturbing injuries that he suffered. In the memoir, Renner says it was a “tiny but monumental slip of the mind” that caused the gruesome accident.
In the book, titled My Next Breath, Jeremy Renner recalls how he almost lost his life on January 1, 2023 and the grueling rehabilitation he underwent to get back to where he is today.
“I didn’t engage the parking brake, or disengage the steel tracks. In that moment – an innocent, critical, life-changing moment – that tiny but monumental slip of the mind would change the course of my life forever,” Renner writes in an excerpt from the book shared by The Guardian.
His mind at the time was more concerned with saving his 27-year-old nephew, Alexander Fries, from being crushed between the snow plow and a truck parked nearby. When he jumped on to the plow to try and stop it, he lost his footing and fell, his “head hit the ground hard and instantly gashed open.”
The next thing he knew, “There came terrible crunching sounds as 14,000-pounds of galvanized steel machinery slowly, inexorably, monotonously, ground over my body. It was a horrifying soundtrack.”
Because he remained conscious throughout the ordeal, Jeremy Renner recalled, “I knew that my skull was split like a watermelon, my brain pulverized like meat.”
He described a disturbing scene, saying he “saw my left eye with my right eye,” and quite frankly, it is a miracle that he didn’t die.
“Skull, jaw, cheekbones, molars; fibula, tibia, lungs, eye sockets, cranium, pelvis, ulna, legs, arms, skin; crack, snap, crack, squeeze, crack,” he wrote. “More sounds: a ringing in the ears, as if a gun had unloaded next to my head. A sting of bright white in my eyes – I was blinded by a coruscating lightning, a lightning that signals the break of my orbital bone, causing my left eyeball to violently burst out of my skull.”
Now, he told People, “It’s part of my life every day, and it’s always a wonderful reminder of the strength of the human spirit and how fragile the body is and how badass it is at recovery.”