You might run into Doug one day

At 5 years old, Doug Kelly tried to pet a German shepherd and it bit him on the head; he got stitches.

At 10, he was riding his bike on a Woodward sidewalk when a driver exited the entrance of a parking lot, hitting him, rolling him onto the hood of her car. She was horrified. "I'm OK," he insisted.

The same year, he was on 13 Mile crossing Woodward on a moped when he says a driver going north ran a red light; he hit the car. The ambulance took him to nearby William Beaumont Hospital; he was treated and released.

At 17, the summer before his senior year at Royal Oak Kimball, he was on his way to work at a restaurant, riding his moped through an alley near Normandy and Woordward, when a driver backed into him from the Midas parking lot, knocking him to the ground. The driver sped off. Doug got stitches in his elbow.

At 18, he was visiting a friend at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo when he jogged into a moving car—another red-light runner, he says—and banged his knee. Nothing too serious, but police wrote a report.

By now Doug had a reputation. Friends called him a "car magnet" and kidded him that they didn't want to cross the street with him.

At 21, when he was at Lansing Community College, he was walking on a sidewalk when a driver pulled out of a McDonald's parking lot and nailed him, mangling his knee. He landed on his face in the eastbound lanes of Grand River Avenue, breaking his nose. At Lansing's Sparrow Hospital that night he wondered, "What can I do? I can't stay inside all the time."

The Monday before last, the Auburn Hills man, 25, was driving through downtown Pontiac, on his way to have lunch with his brother, when a car ran a red light and smacked into his. The driver was ticketed.

Doug's left elbow—the same one that had stitches eight years ago—was broken and cut; he got stitches in it, and in his left temple.

The doctor who put those stitches in removed some stitches in his ankle; he'd cut it on a broken bottle about a week earlier when he was taking out the garbage at a pizza place where he works.

Doug says he is not more careless than most of us, just unlucky. He wonders how to break the spell.

He did not show up as agreed to be photographed Friday; one had to wonder what kept him.

This story originally appeared in The Detroit Free Press and has been published here for portfolio purposes only. The photo is not the original photo.