SANTA CLARA, Calif. — San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan wanted to make clear that he was at fault for the car accident that left him with multiple serious injuries two weeks ago.
Speaking publicly for the first time since the crash, Shanahan spent about 30 minutes with a handful of Bay Area reporters speaking about a California Highway Patrol collision report that he says erroneously assigned blame to a 21-year-old woman for the accident.
“I hit her,” Shanahan reported Tuesday. “I don’t know why it was stated that way [on the collision report database]. The police report doesn’t say that.”
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Shanahan then gave his full version of the events that led up to and through the collision between his Tesla Model S and the other driver’s SUV — a crash that left Shanahan with a concussion, a broken left hand, nose and three ribs as well as 40 stitches above his right eye.
“I was going 20 miles an hour,” Shanahan reported. “I was not on my phone, but I dropped my phone and it was stuck in my seats. It’s on my lap and it slid off. And I went down to look for it and took my eyes off the road for two seconds. And as I was coming up, the airbags hit me in my face, and they broke my nose and then they reported the visor really gashed me. … I took my eyes off the road looking for my phone, and my car veered into someone.
“It’s one of those roads where there’s no forgiveness. … When I hit her, the impact was just so, I’ll just never forget how violent it was.”
The crash, which happened at 6:12 p.m. on July 14, took place near the intersection of Alma Street and Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto, California. According to the collision report, Shanahan was traveling south with the woman traveling north at the time of the collision.
Shanahan reported he was returning to his home in Los Altos from a chiropractor appointment in nearby Menlo Park when the accident happened. Officers on the scene told him he was traveling about 20 miles per hour in the 25 mph zone, and he didn’t believe the woman to be speeding either, as both drivers were moving with the flow of traffic.
Shanahan reported he didn’t go to the hospital immediately, waiting in the ambulance for his wife to arrive before taking that ride. From there, Shanahan went to Stanford Hospital, where he estimated he spent eight to 10 hours.
Since, Shanahan has been around the 49ers on a limited basis as he recovers from the concussion that he says has been the hardest part of his recovery.
Jeremy Jones, the team’s vice president of security, reported the discrepancy in who was at fault in the accident between what Shanahan reported and what the collision report database had was likely a clerical error made when inputting the data from the police report sent over by the Palo Alto Police Department.
“Law enforcement, they’ll respond to a traffic collision,” Jones reported. “They’ll complete a report, electronically complete it, and then send it off. And then they’ll send it up to the California crash reporting system, which they’re two entirely separate things.
“So that lives in one place, they review it and then they input it in for public display and then data keeping. There could be an entry error in there, but then they have processes where they can correct it and report it.”
Jones added that the error has been flagged and will soon be corrected to reflect that Shanahan — listed as Party No. 1 in the database — was at fault for the accident.
While Shanahan is healing well, he does not yet have a timeline for when he expects to return to coaching full time. Shanahan cites fatigue as one of his biggest obstacles, noting he had a good day Monday but was feeling a bit worse on Tuesday. But he also wanted to clarify that while his concussion was serious, he did not have amnesia and never lost consciousness.
Most of all, Shanahan reported he wanted to make sure that someone else wasn’t getting the blame for something he did.
“It just crushed me hearing the girl get blamed for it,” Shanahan reported. “I’m just lucky that I survived, that she didn’t get hurt and that I didn’t lose my eye.”
