A 17-year-old teenager was in the right place at the right time to rescue a 76-year-old woman who didn’t know she had a brain bleed. High school senior Johnson Thompson headed to work early before dawn when he noticed that an elderly woman who seemed to be disoriented across the street. With some quick thinking, he brought her a chair and called 911, a decision that she says saved her life.
Johnson Thompson called a “guardian angel”
On June 30 at around 4:30 a.m., Thompson couldn’t sleep due to him having suffered a severe concussion from a lawnmower accident that happened a week earlier, as reported by People and CBS19. So he went to work early at his family’s workshop in Tuscumbia. That’s when Thompson spotted an elderly woman in distress in the parking lot across the street.
After driving about 20 miles from Cherokee to Tuscumbia, Garner had gotten out of her car and began tugging on a door of a business that was closed, given that it was still early in the morning. Johnson approached her and asked if she was feeling alright.
“I asked her if I could help her with anything since it was so early,” Thompson recounted. “She told me that she had a terrible headache and she was kind of disoriented.”
When Garner said she was going to walk to the nearest emergency room, which was more than a mile away, Thompson asked whether he should call an ambulance. Though she declined, he called 911 anyway and brought Garner a chair.
It was only later that physicians found out that Garner was suffering from a severe brain bleed and needed to be transferred immediately by helicopter to the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital.
Even now, Garner has trouble recalling what happened during that fateful day. “The last thing I remember was having a bad headache,” she told TODAY. “I don’t remember leaving the house. I don’t remember driving. I don’t remember stopping at lights. I don’t remember parking the car.”
The woman didn’t know the teenager’s name or phone number, but after her niece, Monique Stanley, went to Facebook asking the community for more information on Garner’s rescuer, they were finally reunited.
“So many people are looking at their phones,” Stanley said. “For him to notice that something was wrong, that’s what made the difference.”
“He’s a guardian angel for sure,” Garner added.
At a local courthouse, Garner’s family handed a lifesaving award to Johnson, who hopes that they will be able to attend his high school graduation in May.
“It’s crazy how it could have turned out if God wouldn’t have placed me there that morning. So I don’t think it was a coincidence at all,” Johnson said. “I think the Lord, he protected me during that lawnmower incident, so he used me to help Miss Garner.”
