Many of us can only wonder how we would react in the case of an emergency. You can plan all you want, but you never know exactly what will happen until the situation arises. This man got the chance to find out.
It was an ordinary day for 39-year-old Randy Tompkins. He and his wife were driving down an Illinois road in their pickup truck, not expecting anything out of the ordinary. Suddenly, Randy noticed a problem: there was a car swerving in the road in front of him. No one likes a bad driver, but this wasn’t the only point of concern. The car was driving in the opposite direction! It was swerving on the wrong side of the yellow lines.
By this time Randy was an experienced driver, but he immediately flashed back to an incident that had happened when he was younger. When he was 16 years old, he had been involved in a car crash. He ended up in a head-on collision with a 92-year-old woman. She’d had a seizure while behind the wheel, and she had completely lost the ability to drive. The experience was a valuable lesson for Randy in awareness, but he never imagined he would call upon this experience again, this time later in life.
Since Randy’s car was facing the opposite direction of the runaway car, he was able to see the driver clearly. He noticed that something was terribly wrong: the driver’s hands were not clutching the steering wheel but his own chest. This man was having a seizure, just like the woman that had crashed into Randy all those years ago.
This time, Randy was prepared. He pulled his truck out to the opposite side of the road – the side the seizing driver should have been on. He parked near the side of the road and bolted toward the moving car. What he did next was astounding.
Without hesitation, Randy dove into the passenger seat of the runaway car! His first priority was to shift the gear into park. This way the car would no longer threaten the safety of the seizure victim or of any other drivers on the road.
As the car slowed to a stop, a police officer stepped up to the vehicle. The car had gotten the officer’s attention when it ran a red light a few moments before. The turn at the intersection was what had caused the driver to drift to the wrong side of the road. What had seemed most striking to the police officer was how slow the car was going.
Officer Lincoln Sharp had been completely unaware of what was happening to the driver of the runaway vehicle. Since he had been driving his police car behind the vehicle, he was not able to see the warning signs that were evident to Randy. Officer Sharp was absolutely shocked at Randy’s heroic behavior.
“It happened so fast,” Officer Sharp explained to the Chicago Tribune. “When [Randy] jumped through the window, I just stopped what I was doing . . . He kind of downplayed it, but not everybody would have acted that way.” Sharp added that “it was pretty tremendous” to watch a civilian spring into action to save the life of another.
The driver was taken to a hospital, where he stayed until he recovered. He later reached out to Randy to thank him for his help. This had been the driver’s first seizure – who knows what may have happened if Randy hadn’t been there.
Randy is a true hero. When he saw a fellow driver in danger, he selflessly did whatever he could to alleviate the situation. It is heartwarming to see how much human beings care about one another.
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