A woman in Tennessee crashed her car into a gas station, causing her to fall unconscious as the vehicle caught on fire, but a pair of bystanders nearby sprung into action to save her. 47-year-old Angela Vandiver was driving southbound on Highway 51 when police say that she might have experienced a medical emergency. Her vehicle left the roadway and collided into the station’s gas pump. Fortunately, several people who witnessed the incident didn’t wait around for the fire department to arrive.
Two bystanders ran toward the burning vehicle
On July 30 at around 8:00 a.m., several citizens rescued Vandiver by pulling her from the burning vehicle, which crashed into the gas pump of a Midway Market station, according to a post from the Covington Tennessee Police Department on its official Facebook page.
One of the bystanders, Drew Gookin, told Action News 5 that he was just on a normal grocery run when he saw the flames rising from the car.
“I seen something and I just reacted, is all I did,” he recalled. “Not a hero, just a reaction to something that I thought I could do.”
As gas station employees turned off the fuel to prevent the fire from spreading further and some witnesses waited for emergency services, Gookin realized that Vandiver was still in the vehicle. That’s when he and another bystander decided to act as quickly as possible.
He said, “I was just thinking, ‘This is somebody’s mom, grandma, wife, whatever. It’s a person. We got to get to her.’ That’s it.”
The pair was able to find an open door and pull the unconscious Vandiver from the burning wreck to safety. “We pulled the lady out; she’s having what we think is a seizure,” Gookin recalled. “So, we immediately kept dragging her over there, across the street.”
Gookin says that he couldn’t feel the intensity of the flames due to adrenaline. Both he and the bystander were treated by a third citizen who was a nurse.
The Covington Fire Department, Covington Police Department, and Baptist Priority Ambulance Service responded to the scene. The fire was extinguished, while Vandiver was transported to the Baptist Memorial Hospital in Tipton. The driver is in stable condition.
Chief Donna Turner of the Covington Police Department praised the two bystanders for their heroic actions: “I want to thank the two (2) good Samaritan citizens who put their own safety in jeopardy to save the driver’s life by pulling her from the vehicle, which was fully engulfed in flames.”
