At left, Jonah Spaulding meets his friends John McVey and Mark Cascione in downtown Tampa, scene of the hit-and-run crash that nearly killed him. FRED FOX/Tribune photo.

TAMPA - On a cool February night in 1997, three friends dined at Boca, a trendy Ybor City restaurant.

Rick Spaulding, then 25, had landed a job.

He lived in Maine but would move to Tampa, where his old buddy John McVey lived. Spaulding had been promised a management position at The Disney Store in West Shore Plaza.

After dinner, they went to a dance club. McVey, designated driver, drank one glass of wine in 4 1/2 hours, he recalls. On the way home, roommate Mark Cascione sat up front in the red Plymouth Sundance. Spaulding sat in back.

The Sundance purred along Scott Street in downtown Tampa.

Then, at Morgan Street, a Jeep approached a stop sign, fast.

``Oh, my God, he's not going to stop,'' McVey remembers saying.

It was too late to avoid a crash.

The Jeep hit the Sundance in back.

``It blew out the back window,'' McVey says.

``We spun around 360 degrees. We were literally sucked against the seats. We had seat belt burns.

``Seat belts really work.''

McVey knows.

Spaulding, usually careful, had forgotten to buckle his.

``I reached behind me and said, `Rick, you OK?' I started to feel around for him,'' McVey says. ``I though he might be unconscious. I didn't feel or see him. I said, `Oh, my God, Rick's not in the car.' ''

Cascione looked over the dashboard.

``I know,'' he answered.

Their friend had shot out the back window like a cannon ball.

He landed 50 to 60 feet away.

``Mark immediately turned my car off because he smelled gas,'' McVey says. ``Luckily, it didn't ignite.''

Cascione couldn't get out. His door wouldn't open.

McVey crawled out a window.

``As I'm crawling out - everything was a little crushed - as I'm doing that, the guy who hit us, he came running over. He looked at me, looked in the car, then saw Rick.

``He said, `Oh, shit.'

``Then he ran back to his Jeep.''

The man's face etched itself into McVey's memory.

McVey guesses he was 26 or older, 5-foot-9 and chunky, maybe 40 pounds overweight with short, short hair. African-American. Preppy.

He would help.

He would call 911.

Or so McVey assumed.

``As I'm trying to crawl out, I hear an engine. I look and he's backing up the Jeep.''

It looked like a Jeep Wrangler, white with a camel canvas top and a steel bar across the front.

It disappeared into the night.

``I was in shock,'' McVey says. ``I was reeling from the fact this guy took off. I kept saying, `That guy just took off.' Mark's saying, `Let me out of the car.' I help Mark out.

``I say, `I'll call 911. You get Rick' - because Mark's a doctor.

``There was so much blood. It was horrible.

``My thought was, he was dead. Movies and TV do nothing to prepare you for real life. It's so glamorized. When you see somebody in trauma, it's horrible. There was just so much blood.''

McVey tried to call 911. His cell phone wouldn't work.

Someone, somewhere, got through.

``Mark was checking vitals. He said, `He's still alive.'

``Rick sort of coughed but he was unconsicous. The ambulance came. I kept telling everybody, `The guy took off.' ''

Police officers arrived.

One wrote down names.

Next to Spaulding, the officer wrote, ``possible fatality.''

At Tampa General Hospital, they learned Spaulding had suffered severe head trauma and a fractured pelvis. There were other problems - abrasions to his face, lacerations to his legs.

His ear dangled from his head.

He had slipped into a coma.

His family came from Maine and stayed at the Ronald McDonald house.

They stood by his bed.

He didn't see them. He couldn't.

In his mind, he was someplace else, locked alone inside a building. The building looked like a dance club. He climbed the stairs, over and over. Up and down. He searched the hallways.

He looked for a door.

Eight days after a stranger left him to die, Rick found the door.

He woke up.

He couldn't walk. He couldn't eat. He couldn't even go to the bathroom.

Recuperation took a year.

He relearned life, from scratch.

``I felt like someone pressed the pause button on my life,'' he says. ``Thank goodness it wasn't stop and eject.''

He's deaf in his right ear. He saw double for a while, cross-eyed until his brain sorted things out.

Scars mark him, body and soul.

``I guess I have lost some faith in mankind,'' he says.

``I can't see how someone would be more concerned about covering their own ass than taking responsibility for almost killing another human being.''

The Jeep driver was never found.

Given a chance, Spaulding would face that man, the stranger everyone assumes was drunk or illegal or maybe just a coward.

``Look at what you've done to me,'' Spaulding would say.

He might tell the man that even good came from the bad.

His family and friends grew closer. His mother and sister doted over him like private nurses.

He knows, now, the depth of the love around him.

And the danger.

``Drinking and driving? It makes me cringe. It did before. But now so even more.

``You think, `Hey, I don't care. I'm drinking, I'm driving, I can handle it.' No. You are taking everyone else's lives on the road in your hands.

``You are taking everyone else's life for granted.''