Rick Harper wasn’t expecting to be a hero as he was driving on Lake Shore Blvd. Thursday morning and helped save a woman from a fiery crash.
On his route, a Tesla had crashed into a guardrail and then went into a concrete pillar, causing the vehicle to burst into flames near Cherry St.
The vehicle had five passengers.
Harper pulled over to help with his fire extinguisher.
“But as soon as I got out of the truck, they were yelling, you know, that they needed a bar or something to break the window because they were basically pounding the window with their hands, and that wasn’t getting anybody anywhere,” Harper told CTV News on Friday. “So, I grabbed the bar out of the truck I had.”
Harper and another Good Samaritan broke the vehicle’s back window.
“(I) took a few swings at the window, and I passed the bar onto the fella beside me, and he took a few swings, and then the window came out. And then (it) was good to see the young lady come out head first out of the window,” Harper recalled.
The woman, 25, was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
He didn’t know there were other occupants and the woman offered no information.
“There was panic in her eyes. Nobody asked her anything. She probably wouldn’t be able to talk,” he said. “We just assumed it was a driver who was trapped, and without fire equipment, we couldn’t do anything for the driver.”
Harper said he looked inside the vehicle, but it was dark and he didn’t see any other occupants.
But he does remember hearing a “small voice” that was “letting out yells.”
“It was so muffled and so quiet and so weak,” he said. “That’s what hurts, hearing a voice and then finding out later, a few hours later, people were in that car, and nobody knew. Nobody knew until the fire was out.”
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“If we had known there was somebody else, we would have tried to crawl in the window or grab somebody else, but it was dark inside the car. You couldn’t see in there,” he said, adding he feared there could be an explosion.
“I had to get it out of there. I didn’t know if the battery was going to blow up, and, you know, cause a big fire with all the equipment around there,” Harper said. “I just continued on after I did everything I could do.”