Three months after Jeremy Renner was crushed underneath a 14,000-pound PistenBully snowplow in a harrowing accident, the authorities have released the police body cam footage of that terrifying January day. In the video published by TMZ, first responders tend to Jeremy, 52, as he lay on the ground near his property in Reno, Nevada. Though the footage has been heavily edited to spare anyone the details of seeing Jeremy’s broken body, the scene plays out next to a pool of blood and the snowcat that ran over the actor.
“Right where his blood is at, that’s right where it all happens,” says a man, likely Jeremy’s nephew, when describing the incident and the Avengers star’s heroism. Jeremy was using the snowplow to pull his nephew’s truck out of the snow. Jeremy later told the police that after he freed the truck, the snowplow started “sliding sideways” and “rolling down the hill.” Jeremy exited the vehicle without setting the emergency brake, noticed that the plow was headed directly toward his nephew, and tried to get back inside the vehicle’s cab. Jeremy tried to jump on the snowplow, but the treads pulled him under.
The bodycam footage reveals the helicopter that airlifted Jeremy to a nearby hospital. In an interview with Diane Sawyer, Jeremy listed the details of his accident, including how he broke eight ribs in fourteen places, suffered a collapsed lung, a broken mandible, and numerous fractured bones throughout his body.
Despite coming so close to death – to the point that Jeremy was considering end-of-life options if he was going to be left reliant on painkillers or permanently hooked to life support machines– Jeremy said he’d “do it again” in a heartbeat. “Yeah, I’d do it again because it’s going right up to my nephew,” he added.
“I was awake through every moment. It’s exactly what you would imagine it would feel like,” he said in the interview with Diane Sawyer. “It is hard to imagine what that feels like, but when you look at the machine, and you look at — I was on asphalt and ice. I wish I was on snow. It felt like someone took the wind out of you. Too many things are going on in the body to feel pain, it’s everything. It’s like if your soul could have pain.”