It wasn’t long before the police, firetrucks, and ambulance arrived. We flagged down one of the firemen and told them we needed to talk to the police. The fireman pointed toward the man we had seen running and told us that he (the man driving the red pickup) had been hit and knocked into the intersection. He told him this was not true and that he had run through the intersection and hit all the other cars. The fireman told us to stay put until an officer could come over and talk to us.

So the fireman thought the pickup truck guy was the victim and he was hit by the other cars? Is that what the pickup guy told him or was it something else(or you have no idea why).

You said “He told him this was not true…” Isn’t a typo and you meant to say “We told him…”? Because if it wasn’t a typo does that mean the pickup truck guy confessed his part of the accident?

The fireman asked you to wait for a cop to talk to you. Did a cop eventually talk to you? Anything interesting about that talk (I’m guessing not)? Did you give your names to the cop (if so you may get a visit from an insurance appraiser or a lawyer from one of the injured parties – that happened to me when I witness an accident)?

Finally: since you saved your wife’s life, has she properly thanked you yet? /Gives the innocent eyes look but not really. Nudge nudge. Wink. Wink.

I’ve heard of crazy impulses making normally sane people do crazy crap, but given your description, every instinct I’m capable of says “stolen car / just robbed somebody.” Seems to me like that casual disregard for the lives of others points to him already going down for whatever he’d just done.

Most of this, however, can probably be lumped into the vastly oversimplified assessment that the guy was an enormous asshole.