NEW YORK CITY — Amid the packed crowds celebrating the champion Knicks, a sudden medical crisis turned into a frantic fight to save a life.
A small group of bystanders and responders climbed into action atop the World Trade Center subway elevator entrance, where a man appeared to be in serious distress.
“He wasn’t doing well. I looked up, I watched the man start vomiting, I watched his eyes roll back,” said Peter Shrieve-Don. “I’m just desperate trying to get the guy up. I’m just trying to wake him up.”
Shrieve-Don, who said he has no medical training, noticed what looked like a medical emergency during Thursday’s Knicks Parade. Despite being warned not to climb onto the structure, he said he felt compelled to help.
“We’re all just going to do this dance here we got – we’re saying ‘somebody, somebody, somebody!’ And sometimes that somebody’s got to be you,” Shrieve-Don said.
Simone Kelly, an off-duty volunteer with the South Orange Rescue Squad who had been attending the parade, quickly stepped in. She was joined by another first responder who has not been identified.
“When we looked in his eyes, he had pinpoint pupils, which is a telltale sign of an opiate overdose or opiate use in general,” said Kelly.
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Kelly said the man was unresponsive and struggling to breathe. Moments later, someone in the crowd threw up a critical tool: a dose of Narcan.
Paramedics arrived a short while after that, but helping people is not a foreign concept to Kelly.
“But having two thousand people watching is definitely, you know, not what I’m used to. This roar came from the crowd – I got goosebumps,” Kelly said.
Shrieve-Don and Kelly are hoping the man make a full recovery while spreading awareness.
“I hope having so many eyes shows that we have an epidemic going on,” Kelly said.
“I hope you don’t need the whole world to do right all the time. You just need enough people to do right enough of the time,” added Shrieve-Don.
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