LOS ANGELES – Hopefully soon Alijah Arenas will find himself back, lost in the music of the game. Crunch-time, clutch minutes, that revealing drumbeat of late-game tension that tends to tell us something about people.
I doubt he’ll ever find those basketball moments particularly nerve-racking.
Not after what he went through on April 24, when the Tesla Cybertruck he was driving crashed into a tree and fire hydrant in Reseda.
After watching his new USC teammates practice Monday morning at Galen Center, Arenas – the Los Angeles Daily News 2025 boys basketball player of the year and son of former NBA star Gilbert Arenas – told a quartet of reporters about the crash that occurred at 4:55 a.m. that morning.
He spoke uninterrupted for more than 18 minutes, as if he might still be processing the events that could have cost him his life and had him in an induced coma.
He talked about panicking when he realized he was locked inside a burning vehicle, about experiencing “fight or flight.”
It makes sense that he felt that way, but to hear him tell it, it sounds like the 18-year-old kept his wits about him, that he exhibited impressive problem-solving instincts as he fought to maintain consciousness and to survive a living nightmare.
That, in addition to feeling grateful and relieved, he ought to feel proud of himself.
The crash occurred, he said, on his way home from the DSTRKT, a gym in Chatsworth, where he’d been toiling, working toward 10,000 made buckets that week. (He was on 7,000 when he left the facility.)
Arenas stressed Monday that he feels totally responsible for the incident: “Whether it was me, another car, a malfunction, I don’t really want to, you know, put anybody else in a situation, whoever made the car, anything. I want to take full responsibility for anything I do.”
But the best he could explain it was that as he drove that morning, “the wheel wasn’t responding.” He said he noticed the keypad and lights turning off, but that none of that worried him much until he was at a stoplight and realized the wheel “wasn’t moving as, like, easy as it should.” So he sped up, he said, to try to put distance between himself and any traffic behind him, to give himself space to pull over. His Life360 app would tell him he reached a speed of 55 mph.
“Next thing,” Arenas said, hand to his chest, “all I remember was feeling pressure.”
He said, initially, he thought he was waking up at home. And then, “I heard crackling noises, like a campfire.”
“It was hot, it felt like a really hot sauna,” he said, describing being unable to see outside of the car because of the smoke.
“OK,” he asked himself, “What did I do? How did I get here?”
Also: “My dad’s gonna kill me.”
“But my main thing,” Arenas said, “was, ‘I don’t think this car can work. Everything is off; the fire is on.’”
He next thought was that he’d get out and find the nearest gas station, call for help, get water, call his dad, “just kind of get this under control. … I wasn’t upside down, I wasn’t sideways, my phone’s still in the [car’s dedicated] pocket, so I was just like, it couldn’t have been that bad.”
And then he realized the door wouldn’t open. And that the car’s lock screen was displayed. “When I saw that … I realized what situation I was in.”
His next steps included taking off his seatbelt and moving to the backseat of the car, checking for cracks or any option for exit. He said he bit his lips and curled his hands tight to try to keep himself awake in intense heat and smoke that was making it difficult to breathe. He found water he’d bought earlier at a gas station and used some of it to “wipe himself down” to try to cool off. He said he’d use the rest of it later, after he’d taken off his clothes, dousing himself when the fire encroached further.
Arenas’ next thought, as he remembered it, was to make as much noise as possible, to yell and scream and bang on windows. He tried to blow the horn, too, he said, but because the vehicle was off, it didn’t sound.
He also said he used his fists and then his feet to try to break the car’s sturdy, “bulletproof” windows, moving from the front driver’s-side window to the windshield, which seemed to crack at about the same time he started to hear thudding noises outside the car. It was water from the hydrant, but not knowing he’d hit one, Arenas said, “I thought it was raining.”
He positioned himself so if he passed out again, he’d fall into the backseat, where there was plenty of leg space and, Arenas figured, “airspace.” “All I remember, just passing out into the backseat, my legs in the air,” he said. “And then, thankfully, somebody was on the outside working on [getting into the car] at the same time … and as they took off the window, they saw my leg and they touched it, and I kind of went back up, and I just went for it.
“Then, after that, all I kind of remember is hitting the floor and then feeling like a sensation of just cooling my body… like a river, because there was so much water.
“Next thing I know, I remember seeing lights. I remember looking at a ceiling full of lights and somebody holding my arm. I think that was the first hospital. And then the next one, I remember I woke up and I couldn’t speak,” said Arenas, who was in the hospital for six days.
“And my first thought process waking up was, ‘Did I hit somebody?’”
He did not, thankfully.
But he did hit on several realizations, including when he came home to so many flowers and “smiles on smiles on smiles” how very loved he is. By family and friends, teammates and neighbors he never even knew.
“I appreciate a lot,” Arenas added. “I appreciate more than what I thought. I appreciate everybody around. I’m appreciative for just somebody randomly helping me.”
That part – that part especially. After strangers helped save his life, he wants to be able to help do the same for others.
That is why Alijah – a personable, charming guy who introduces himself to everyone he meets with a handshake and who clearly shares not only his podcasting dad’s deep bag of basketball skills but Gilbert’s gift of gab – said he’s so willing to share his story as he begins this college chapter of his career.
Before he begins practicing with the Trojans, the five-star McDonald’s All-American has a few more academic boxes to check after graduating early from Chatsworth High School.
As he picked USC, eschewing bigger-name college programs like Arizona and Louisville, Kansas and Kentucky, Arenas chose to play his high school ball at Chatsworth, leading the Chancellors to two consecutive CIF State SoCal Regional titles and needing only three seasons to become the first player in the CIF LA City Section to reach the 3,000-point mark.
Now he said he’s eager to move forward, to work at USC – and to share, whoever needs to hear it.
“That is a memory for me to help somebody else,” Alijah said. “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.”
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