Highway Angels

Quick-thinking driver aids accident victims

The TCA recognized Jim Hoffman of Roswell, NM 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 Hwy 84 near Scranton, PA when he caught sight of a faint blue light flashing in the middle of the road. Hoffman slowed down and saw a young woman, whose cell phone 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 frigid temperatures, brought her into his rig and called 911.
     “When she climbed into the truck, I saw that her leg was bleeding,” Hoffman said. 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 car with her.
     Hoffman quickly grabbed his jacket and a flashlight and 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.
     While waiting for the paramedics to arrive, Hoffman spent 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 helped the wandering man into the ambulance and hurriedly worked on the four victims. Later, one of the paramedics wrote to Hoffman’s company commending him, because “his quick thinking really made a difference for the well-being of strangers.”