Ryan Kartje (LA Times)  —  When Alijah Arenas opened his eyes, minutes after his Tesla Cybertruck struck a tree one morning this past April, the five-star Chatsworth High hoops phenom wasn’t sure where he was or how he’d gotten there. His initial, disoriented thought was that he’d woken up at home. But as he regained consciousness, Arenas felt the seat belt wrapped tightly around his waist. He noticed the Life360 app on his phone, beeping. Outside the car, he could hear crackling sounds, like a campfire.

Then he felt the heat like a sauna cranked to its highest setting. The passenger side of the dashboard, Arenas could see, was already engulfed in flames. Smoke was filling the car’s front cabin. He could no longer see out of the windows.

Arenas reached for his iPhone, intent on using his digital key to escape, only to find the Tesla app had locked him out. Panic started to set in.

“I tried to open the door,” Arenas said, “and the door isn’t opening.”

He tore off his seat belt and moved to the back seat, away from the smoke, scanning the car desperately for an exit strategy. His heart was pounding. The heat was becoming unbearable. Then, he passed out.

No more than 10 minutes earlier — and less than two miles up Corbin Avenue — Arenas had just wrapped up a predawn workout at the DSTRKT, a gym in Chatsworth, where he’d been working his way up to 10,000 shots that week.

One of the top hoops prospects in the nation, Arenas was weeks away from graduating from Chatsworth High after three years with the intention of joining USC a year early in 2025. He was doing everything he could to prepare for that extraordinary leap.

He was on his way home from the gym, driving south on Corbin as he had so many times before, when Arenas noticed that the Cybertruck — which is registered to his father, former NBA star Gilbert Arenas — was acting strangely. The car wasn’t reading that he left the gym. The keypad kept flickering on and off.

After stopping at one red light, he tried to switch lanes, only to notice that “the wheel wasn’t moving as easily as it should.” Drifting into the right lane, he realized that he “can’t get back to the left.”

“So then a car is coming towards me, and I think that I’ll just pull over,” he said. “So I speed up to pull over to the right in a neighborhood because there are cars parked on the street I’m on to the right. But when I’m speeding up to turn, I can’t stop. The wheel wasn’t responding to me — as if I wasn’t in the car.”

The Cybertruck careened instead into a fire hydrant, then a tree, before bursting into flames.

Minutes felt like hours as he tried to escape the smoldering car. Drifting in and out of consciousness, Arenas did whatever he could to stay alert. He bit his lip as hard as he could and clenched his nails into his skin. He doused himself with water from a water bottle to cool his body down. He tried to make as much noise as possible, yelling and banging on the glass. But the flames were getting hotter, the smoke getting thicker.

“I’m panicking,” Arenas said. “I was fighting time.”

He set out to break a window, knowing Cybertruck windows are meant to be “unbreakable.” When his hands ached from punching the glass, he started using his feet. Then he passed out again.

USC freshman Alijah Arenas, who survived a Cybertruck crash earlier this year, talks with reporters on Tuesday. (Ryan Kartje / LAT)

When he woke up, “I realized my whole right side had caught on fire,” he said.

But as he tore off his clothes and doused himself in water again, he heard a thud outside the car window. Sirens wailed in the distance. Just keep going, he told himself.

He kicked at the driver’s-side window with everything he had. Eventually, he spotted a crack. He kept kicking, drifting briefly out of consciousness, before the window fell away and hands began pulling him from the vehicle by his legs.

The next thing he remembers feeling was a cold rush, as if he’d jumped in a freezing river. A video of the crash scene obtained by TMZ shows Arenas lying face down in the street in a few inches of water, while the broken hydrant continues to spray into the air, after a group of good Samaritans had come to his rescue.

In all, Arenas spent at least 10 minutes in the burning car before people who happened to hear the accident eventually helped pull him to safety. It’s not lost on him how lucky he was.

“There are amazing people in this world that are willing to help and risk their own bodies for you,” Arenas said. “For me, it was like, I don’t ever want to think about me ever again.”

Alijah Arenas, of Chatsworth High, drives to the basket. (Nick Koza)

The next hours and days are still hazy for Arenas, who was whisked away to a nearby hospital, then another. He was put into a medically induced coma, a common approach for dealing with extreme smoke inhalation.

When he finally awoke, Arenas still couldn’t speak. But right away, panic set in. He wondered if his car had hit another, or if anyone else had been hurt.

Months later, he still can’t bring himself to place any blame elsewhere for what happened. Even though there are no indications that Arenas was at fault for his steering wheel locking up.

“Honestly, I take full responsibility,” Arenas said. “Whether it was me, another car, a malfunction. I don’t really want to put anyone else in this situation — whoever made the car, anything. I want to take full responsibility for what I do. If I would’ve hurt somebody, that would have really taken a toll on me.”

Arenas spent six days in the hospital after the accident but suffered no major long-term injuries. In the weeks that followed, he took walks through his family’s neighborhood to regain his strength. Along the way, neighbors showered him with flowers and well wishes. Last month, the family welcomed the men who saved Arenas into their home to share their gratitude.

He’s still working his way toward joining USC for its summer hoops practices, with some preliminary classwork still remaining before his transition is complete. But after officially enrolling at USC last week, Arenas stood on the practice court sideline on Tuesday morning, high-fiving teammates and calling out assignments, looking every bit the part of a five-star freshman who’s ready to step in from Day One.

“His perspective is really unique,” USC coach Eric Musselman said. “Even before the accident, when you talk to Alijah, it’s a unique thought process on how he views life and views the game of basketball and how he views his teammates.”

But there’s no mistaking, in Arenas’ mind, how fortunate he is to have survived — and how many things had to go right for that to be the case. He’s convinced he was spared to help someone else in the same way he was helped.

“It taught me a lot,” Arenas said. “I’m very lucky — and not even just to be here. Just in general, in life. That is a memory for me to help somebody else. You know, I’m still here to help somebody else. I’m really glad God gave me a chance to help another person that is probably going through way worse than what I’m going through right now.”

In picking USC, Arenas passed over bigger-name college programs like Arizona, Louisville, Kansas and Kentucky. He led the Chatsworth Chancellors to two consecutive CIF State SoCal Regional titles and needed only three seasons to become the first player in the L.A. City Section to reach the 3,000-point mark.

latimes.com

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