Joseph DaSilva Jr., of Warren, a former police officer, recalls the traumatic experience of striking a man jumping from a highway overpass.DaSilva

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

Joseph DaSilva Jr. delivered his wife to the airport in plenty of time for her 8 a.m. flight Monday. “I waited a while to make sure she was OK.

“What if I didn’t wait?” he has since asked himself.

“I have repeatedly wrestled with the decisions I made that morning,” says DaSilva — decisions as small as not stopping for coffee on his way home, or changing lanes as he headed north on Route 95.

Because of each decision, his SUV was the third vehicle to hit Karl T. Pernsley, who jumped into traffic from an overpass just before 6 a.m. Monday, after trying to kill himself and his girlfriend by crashing at the Route 10 exit. Pernsley died, and a chain reaction of car accidents followed.

“I’m not new to a lot of this stuff,” says DaSilva, a retired Warren police sergeant, “but even for me it was very surreal.”

Although he was in shorts on a chilly Monday morning, he dripped sweat for the 10 straight minutes of crashing cars, until traffic slowed.

For DaSilva, 43, it started when he saw a pickup ahead swerve to avoid what DaSilva thought was a bag of leaves. He had a second to realize he was going to hit it, and worried that something inside the bag could damage his vehicle. It did.

It wasn’t a bag of leaves, but a man.

DaSilva’s engine quit, so he steered to the left and parked under the bridge. A white BMW hit the man, and DaSilva’s instincts from 20 years in law enforcement kicked in.

“My first thought was to try to keep as many people from getting hurt as possible,” he recalled. He pulled the hysterical driver from her BMW and set her on the 3-foot-wide barrier between the two high-speed lanes.

Then he pulled Pernsley’s girlfriend from the middle of the road before a car could hit her. “I put her up there with the other one.”

He called 911. The two women screamed behind him. He called his wife because, “to be honest, I didn’t know how it was going to end.”

One driver lost control of her vehicle, which spun 180 degrees and landed nose-to-nose with his. He shouted for her to stay in her car and back out of the strike zone, where cars were smashing into each other. A car sideswiped hers on the driver’s-side door.

“That young girl, if she had gotten out of her car….,” he said. “It could have been so much worse.”

DaSilva said Thursday that he has arrived at many a disturbing scene. “It kind of hardens you.” He has an internal switch to turn off his emotions, he said, so he can do what needs to be done. But “I felt really bad, especially for that first woman in the BMW.” People like her were unprepared for the “horrific terror, trauma and emotion.”

“When you see it from afar,” he said, “it’s an annoyance” to be stuck in traffic, thinking of being late to work, or missing coffee. “Just remember, this is somebody’s mother or father.”

“I pray for all others involved,” he said, especially David Romano, two vehicles ahead, who kept driving because he didn’t know he had hit a man, and then returned. DaSilva said he hopes the others “are able to know and accept that the incident was not under their control, and unavoidable…. It was like a meteor falls from the sky.”

You wonder about your decisions, he said, “but you can’t torment yourself about them. You have to move on.”

The trouble with having an emotional switch, he said, is that it doesn’t keep you from waking up in the night. “You relive it in your dreams, and the people change” into your own loved ones.

“Thank God it was me who went through it, and not my wife, or my daughter.”

His children, in their early teens, know only that he was in an accident, and that he’s OK.

He tells them: “This is why you’re careful. This is why you enjoy each day.”

dnaylor@projo.com