The Truckload Carriers Association recently recognized John Christner Trucking driver Jim Hoffman, of Roswell, N.M., as a Highway Angel for assisting several young adults involved in a serious car accident in subfreezing temperatures.
In the darkness of an early winter morning, Hoffman was traveling eastbound on Highway 84 near Scranton, Pa., when he caught sight of a faint blue light flashing in the middle of the road. Unable to detect what it was, Hoffman slowed down and moved to the shoulder of the road. “As I slowed down, I heard a woman scream for me to stop,” Hoffman says.
After securing his vehicle, Hoffman investigated the site and found a young woman, whose cellphone was emitting the blue light, standing in the road yelling. She said her car had rolled over, and Hoffman, wanting to get her out of the single-digit temperatures, brought her into his rig and called 911.
“When she lifted up her leg to climb into the truck, I saw it was bleeding,” Hoffman says. He found a compress to stop the bleeding and asked the woman what had happened. That’s when he learned three male friends had been in the vehicle with her. Hoffman quickly grabbed his jacket and a flashlight, instructed the woman to “just sit there,” and hurried into the cold darkness.
After crossing the tree-studded median, Hoffman heard a voice moaning in pain and headed in that direction. He soon came upon all three young men. One had been thrown from the vehicle and was lying in the snow, and the other two were roaming around disoriented and bleeding from cuts to the head. Knowing it was dangerous to move someone involved in an accident, Hoffman decided to wait for the paramedics to tend to the injured man in the snow, but he was concerned that the victim had no shoes or coat and was wearing only pants and a T-shirt.
“I knew he was cold because I was getting pretty cold, so I brought him a blanket from my truck,” Hoffman says. “Then I got one of the other guys into my truck, but the third guy was in a daze and I couldn’t get him to do anything.” While waiting for the paramedics to arrive, Hoffman spent the remainder of the time hurrying back and forth from the victims in his truck to the suffering young man in the snow. “I felt so bad for him,” Hoffman says. “He kept asking me not to leave him.”
Once on the scene, the emergency crew succeeded in getting the wandering man into the ambulance and hurriedly worked on the four victims, all of whom were in their late teens or early 20s. Shortly after the incident, one of the paramedics wrote a letter to Hoffman’s company commending him, because “his quick thinking really made a difference for the well-being of strangers.”
