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Woman has emotional response to seeing man overdose, crash
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
A Poland man apparently suffered a drug overdose Monday afternoon while driving a pickup truck on Summit Street, causing him to hit the back of a car that was stopped at a traffic light.
An officer found a syringe in the truck’s door handle and found the truck’s driver unconscious and turning blue behind the wheel, then administered two doses of the overdose-reversal drug Naloxone, which revived him.
The driver of the car, a woman, 56, of Burton Street in Warren, and her passenger, a man, 33, were not injured.
The truck driver, Michael R. Ramun, 33, of Clingan Road, was arraigned Tuesday in Warren Municipal Court on misdemeanor drug possession, possession of drug-abuse instruments, failure to control and no seat belt in the 3:10 p.m. crash.
Ramun pleaded not guilty, and he was released after posting $5,000 bond. Ramun was taken by ambulance to ValleyCare Trumbull Memorial Hospital just after the crash.
Ramun’s 2015 Chevrolet Silverado is registered to an industrial company in Poland.
While the officer was checking for identification for Ramun, he found two strips of the drug Suboxone in Ramun’s wallet. Ramun told the officer he didn’t have a prescription for the drug and had not overdosed in a few years, according to a police report.
Marie Lank of Niles told The Vindicator that she saw Ramun in the driver’s seat of the truck beside her as they both stopped for a red light at Tod Avenue Northwest.
Ramun appeared to be looking down at a cellphone, and then the truck started moving forward and struck the back of the car in front of it at a slow speed before the light had turned green, Lank said.
A male in the passenger seat of the truck put the truck in park and tried to wake up Ramun, but eventually he got out and ran, Lank said.
Lank and others got out of their vehicles, saw Ramun unconscious in the truck and tried to wake him up with horns and yells until the officer arrived.
“It was something I wish I will never see again,” Lank said. “I opened the passenger door and said ‘Wake up. Wake up.’” Ramun was “slobbering,” and his breathing was shallow.
She thought how it would feel if she or her children had been hit by an impaired driver and how much worse it might have been if the crash had occurred at high speed or on a deserted road.
“As a mother, I feel for his family,” she said. “The police are doing everything they can to get this epidemic under control, but something needs to be done,” she said.