the aspectual values of the past perfect tense

Hello everybody, I have a question concerning the transposition into indirect speech of the following sentence: "As I was crossing the street, a car almost ran me over". What tense do we need to use in order to maintain the relation of simultaniousness? Can we say "He told me that a car had once almost run him over as he was crossing the street"? My intuition tells me it is incorrect to have the past perfect in both sentences since this tense does not have the same continuous aspectual value. Or is it ok to say "... that a car had almost run him over as he had crossed the street"? For me, this implies the accident took place only once the crossing of the street was accomplished and not during it. Or can we just ignore the sentence sequencing principle here and say just "... that when he was crossing ... a car almost ran him over"? Thanks!