Crash that wounded Reid’s wife so violent it “broke her seat belt,” senator says

WASHINGTON -- The car crash that landed Sen. Harry Reid's wife in the hospital last Thursday was so violent it snapped her seat belt, the senator said Tuesday.

Landra Reid, 69, and her daughter Lana Barringer, 49, were returning from a shopping trip when their Honda Odyssey was rammed from behind by a tractor-trailer on Interstate 95 south of Washington, Harry Reid said.

"It hit them so hard, crushed the three seats -- three rows of seats in that regular-sized van, crushed the two first seats, threw my wife forward, broke her seat belt," said Reid, D-Nev. "She doesn't remember the accident. My daughter does."

Reid, the Senate majority leader, offered new details of the crash and its aftermath in a gathering with reporters. He said his wife, who was the passenger in the minivan, will need to wear a neck brace "for a week or a couple months" and will have to have her broken nose reset.

Doctors at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va., "were very worried" about a neck fracture that Landra Reid suffered, a break at the C-6 level, Reid said.

"That's where people become quadriplegics, and she had been having a lot of trouble the first day with her arm and pain," Reid said. "And morphine didn't help."

A titanium plate was installed Friday during surgery that doctors declared a success. "The minute she got out of surgery and the anesthesia had worn off ... no pain, total feeling," Reid said. "And in a couple hours they had her sitting up. And she's home now. ... She's doing just fine."

Landra Reid was released from the hospital Sunday.

Barringer was treated and released from the hospital Thursday, but Reid said she is returning to a neurologist for dizziness.