Guy Fieri reveals how he escaped death in tragic car accident that killed his friend after drunk joy ride in college: ‘It was horrific’

Guy Fieri opened up about a traumatic experience from his past, as he was a passenger in a vehicle that flipped over amid a drunk driving accident, killing the person next to him.

The TV personality, 55, went into detail Tuesday on the Now What? with Brooke Shields podcast about the deadly incident, which occurred in Las Vegas when he was 19 in the late 1980s.

‘I was in a fatality car accident when I was 19 when I was in college,’ the Columbus, Ohio native said. ‘I wasn’t driving, I was in the backseat.’

The restaurateur at the time was a college student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, when he and a group of members of the military went to watch drag boat races after camping out nearby.

‘Unfortunately, I was with a bunch of guys and…we were drinking,’ he said. 

The Food Network personality got into the details of what had happened, saying that ‘this guy saw a cop and he was drinking … and he took off and we got chased and the car flipped.’

Fieri said the accident ‘was horrific,’ adding, ‘The guy next to me was killed.’

Fieri said that ‘everybody [in the accident] was messed up,’ and that he had to be airlifted for medical treatment amid the carnage.

‘I did go Flight for Life in the helicopter and the whole thing,’ he said.

Fieri said that the people he was with in the accident were ‘all in the military together’ – and claimed that he had been ‘the one that was driving.’

He said that when he awoke in a hospital, he’d been ‘handcuffed to the gurney.’

Fieri recalled a series of events stemming from the tragic incident, as he had to tell his parents, who got him legal representation, and was arrested while in his dorm room.

‘It was going bad after worse because everybody was saying that I was, you know,’ Fieri said, adding that authorities were aware he was not driving at the time of the deadly crash.

The TV personality was pictured earlier this month at the opening of a restaurant in Las Vegas 

Fieri, seen in a presentation for Warner Bros. Discovery Upfront in May, said that the person next to him in the vehicle perished in the crash

Fieri said that his father chastised him him in the wake of the incident, telling him to ‘cut the s***,’ focus and behave like a responsible adult moving forward.

Fieri described to Shields his mindset moving forward from the disastrously experience.

‘I was like, okay – my family didn’t have any money. I’m not the smartest kid – didn’t get the best grades,’ he said. ‘But if I’m going to win, I’m going to win based upon how hard I play and how disciplined I am and how driven and how controlled I am.

‘And if I do that then I have a better chance at getting through this.’

Fieri said he has carried over the guarded lesson to parenting his sons Hunter, 26, and Ryder, 17.

‘It’s things I teach my kids all the time: Don’t trust anybody to drive you,’ he said. ‘Don’t trust what anybody puts in a drink and gives it to you. Don’t trust if anybody tells you that this is safe or this is smart.

‘You have to be the master of your domain. You have to be in control of your environment.’