A quick thinking Douglas Cropper, a Maine State Police Trooper, is being hailed as a hero for helping save the life of a driver overdosing on heroin, as well as preventing a fatal car crash.
According to the Portland Press Herald, Cropper pulled over a Volkswagen Jetta travelling 15 mph over the speed limit, on the Fore River Bridge at 6.15 a.m. on Portland’s Interstate 295. As per the law, Cropper took the license and the registration certificate from the speeding driver, and returned to his cruiser to write out a ticket. But when Cropper went back to the driver, he was shocked to find the driver unresponsive, with his head tilted back and his mouth wide open.
“I thought he had nodded off. Then he started to turn blue from lack of oxygen,” Cropper told the reporters.
Without wasting a moment, Cropper jumped into action, alerted a dispatcher that he needed a rescue crew, tried to wake him up, but when the driver didn’t respond, Cropper dragged him out onto the side of the busy highway and started topump his chest to get the heart beating.
When Leon Chick, an emergency room nurse, saw Cropper trying to revive the driver, he stopped to help him. The two began applying chest compressions. After a couple of minutes, their efforts paid off and the driver responded with a gurgling noise. Later, Portland rescue workers arrived and took over the resuscitation. The driver was administered Narcan, a heroin-effect reversal drug, because of which he recovered enough to walk on his own and was taken to a local hospital.
Cropper was thankful that he pulled the man over at the right time.
“Who knows how much farther along the road he would have gone and started to overdose, drive off the road and killed himself — or even worse, crashed into someone else, some innocent person going to work?”
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