GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) used his combat training on Saturday while driving in Iowa with his wife, saving an 11-year-old boy after the car he was riding in smashed into a semi-truck at full speed.
Van Orden saw the crash in his rearview mirror. He told the Washington Examiner, “I’m watching a Dodge Grand minivan disintegrate. It seemed to drift off the road at about 70 miles per hour, more so on the passenger side of the car. My wife, Sarah, was like, what happened? I looked at it, I said, someone just died.”
He stopped the car in the grass divider and went to see if he could help the car’s occupants in any way.
“I ran to the passenger side, where all the damage was, and there was this 11-year-old kid, and I looked at him, and his calf, which is about as big as my thigh, was completely ripped apart, so I could see his tibia and his fibula, just a big chunk of him bleeding. And he had an arterial bleed in his right wrist,” he said.
Quick action
The boy, whose name was not given in any of the press coverage, was losing a lot of blood and losing it quickly. Van Orden got socks from his car and made a tourniquet to stop the bleeding on his arm.
He wasn’t the only one who stopped to help.
Van Orden continued, “By then, probably 10 people had also pulled over to help, I’m like, does somebody have a knife? And they’re like, yep. So I cut the seat belts off and then made tourniquets.”
“Some big old Iowa farm dude, probably 60-something, rips off a windshield wiper for his arm, then another lady there said she was a medic. She wound up grabbing a piece of metal and made a tourniquet on his leg, and then all of us packed him up and got him up into the ambulance,” he said.
The immediate attention probably saved the boy’s life.
In the rural area where the accident happened, it took emergency response 10 to 15 minutes to get to the scene. “He would’ve been gone,” Van Orden said, without the numerous people who stopped to help.
Team effort
Van Orden visited the boy in the hospital on Monday as he was recovering from his injuries.
“What happened out there is everything that I love about America. So we’re in the middle of somewhere, and this happens, and people just start showing up. They start asking, ‘Hey, can we do this? Can we do that?’” he explained.
He described how as he was applying the tourniquets to the boy’s limbs, people behind him organized traffic control and blocked both lanes until help arrived.
“It’s amazing,” he said.
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Author: Jen Krausz
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