The car into the utility pole. The electrical wires everywhere. The crackling fire. The terrified kid trapped in the car, pounding on the windows.

People around you screaming, "Don't touch the car! Don't touch the car!"

What would you do?

Would you act? Could you?

Mark Sellers did.

Saturday night, the father of three yanked a 17-year-old driver out of a car before it went up in flames along Strasburg Pike in West Lampeter Township.

Today, police are calling Sellers a hero.

"He definitely saved his life," West Lampeter Township Police Chief James Walsh said, adding that police plan to give Sellers a commendation for his actions.

Sellers, a 45-year-old drug sales rep, still is grappling with what happened in just a few minutes that could have forever changed his life and the life of a teen he had never met.

He says he could not have done anything else.

"I was not going to let that kid die in a car fire," he says. "I had to do something. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't do anything and he would have died."

The teen, who police are not identifying due to his age, broke his leg in the accident. He still was in Lancaster General Hospital today, recovering from his injuries, but is expected to be discharged later this week.

The accident happened shortly after 9 p.m. Saturday on Strasburg Pike, near Pioneer Road.

Sellers, his wife, Tara, and their three children, Joslin, 13, Andrew, 10, and Thomas, 7, of 92 Apple Blossom Drive, were coming home from dinner at the Olive Garden at the time.

The flash was caused by the impact of a utility pole carrying three enormous, 600-pound electrical transformers crashing down on the roof of the 17-year-old driver's Volkswagen Jetta.

The teen had lost control of his car and hit the pole head-on. Police say the teen may have been drinking — a witness saw him throwing beer cans out of the window as he drove — but have not charged him at this point, as the investigation is continuing.

When the family arrived at the accident scene a few moments later, Sellers pulled into a nearby parking lot and trained his minivan's headlights on the car. He ran up to the crushed Jetta.

It was a chaotic scene. People, including Sellers' wife, were screaming, "Don't touch the car! You'll get electrocuted!"

Then Sellers saw the kid.

"He was beating on the window, saying, 'I can't get out! I can't get out!' " Sellers says.

Taking in the wires and the transformers, Sellers told the teen to stay put until firefighters and police officers arrived.

"Right after that, I looked down at the engine compartment," he says. "It was on fire."

Sellers yelled to a passerby for a fire extinguisher. Nobody had one. He heard the sirens wailing in the distance but was worried that he didn't have time to wait for help.

He used his own logic to justify what he did next.

"What I did," he says, "was I decided to take my hand, real fast, and just graze the car so, if it was electrified, I wouldn't get struck. I might take a jolt but I wouldn't be sitting there, electrified to the car."

He brushed his hand on the car and, feeling nothing, went full steam ahead, grabbing the door handle and trying to pry it open.

"I pulled so hard that the door handle came off the car," he says. "I went back 15 feet and landed on my derriere."

In the confusion, people thought Sellers had been blown back by an electrical charge but he jumped up and ran back to the car.

Next, he tried to kick in the driver's window.

All the while, the fire was growing.

Finally, Sellers grabbed the back door and found he could open it. But the car's roof was caved in and there wasn't enough room for the driver to crawl over the seat and out the back door.

Plus, the teen said his leg was hurt.

Working together, Sellers and the driver reclined the seat as far as they could.

Sellers grabbed the kid under his arms and squeezed him through the opening that now existed between the collapsed roof and the seat.

He dragged him over to the area where his minivan was parked and covered him with his sport coat, waiting for an ambulance.

Sellers has talked to the driver's parents since the accident.

"His father called me from the hospital," Sellers says, his voice growing thick. "He was very choked up. I was very choked up. And he said, 'Thank you for saving my son's life and I'll think of you every day.' How do you respond to somebody that says that to you?"

Sellers is a father, too, and he knows how the man feels.

"I have a daughter who is 13 and, in a few years, should the tables be turned, I would want somebody to try to get her out of a car," he says.

He is a son, too, and he remembers what his own mother told him a long time ago, something that has come back to him in the past two days, when he wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks about how things went.

And how they could have gone.

For him. And for the driver.

"When I was small," he says, "my mother told me that if you ever died helping someone else out, that you would be given a special place in heaven.

"You know, just looking at that kid in that situation, you just have to act."