Sixteen-year-old Jeramiah Daltin Simmons checked out early Wednesday afternoon from West Limestone High School because he wasn’t feeling well.

At about 3 p.m., while driving home, he lost control of his white 2006 Ford pickup. It went off the roadway, flipped end over end and landed on its driver’s side on the hot pavement of Cotton Belt Road, nine miles north of Athens.

It took fire and rescue workers more than an hour to free Daltin from the wreckage. A MedFlight helicopter then flew him to Huntsville Hospital for treatment.

Limestone County was already nervous Wednesday when it learned of the rollover involving a teenager. Just two days earlier, Ardmore High School student-athlete Kaley Greer died of injuries suffered Friday in a one-vehicle wreck in Ardmore. As many as six students were in a pickup truck when the truck collided with a tree in the First Baptist Church parking lot. Greer was thrown from the truck bed.

Daltin knows he was lucky. Very lucky. He suffered “road rash” to his left arm and hand and a hairline fracture to his left wrist and was released from Huntsville Hospital Wednesday night after the crash. Having worn his seat belt and having never lost consciousness, he remembers every second of the wreck.

“My back right went off the road and caught gravel and shot me across to the middle of the road,” Daltin told The News Courier Thursday. “It swerved back off the road, went halfway up an embankment and flipped forward and landed on the road. I was trapped in there for over an hour upside down.”

The flip and rollover broke the driver’s-side window and exposed Daltin’s left arm to the pavement, resulting in his only injuries aside from soreness.

His dad was at the scene within 15 minutes, and held him up in the truck while rescuers removed the door to free him, he said.

“What was really scary was that I had dreamed I had wrecked the exact same way two days before,” Daltin said.