Seven People Lifted a Volkswagen Off Her

An e-bike rider ended up pinned under a Beetle in a Pennsylvania borough. A sign maker, a home care worker, a FedEx driver and four others tipped the car off her before the ambulance arrived.

In Prospect Park, a small borough in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, the sign shop and the home care agency sit across the street from each other. That is the reason a woman is alive.

Monday morning, at 11th and Lincoln, a 44-year-old from neighbouring Ridley Park was riding an e-bike at 20 to 25 miles an hour, no helmet. A Volkswagen Beetle ahead of her signalled and began to swing right. She tried to go around it. She didn't make it.

The bike went down. She went under the car — pinned on her back, a Beetle sitting on top of her, screaming.

Chrissy Vollmer runs CV Signs a few doors up. "I just heard a bang and a scream," she said. "So I ran out and I saw someone's legs underneath the car and then the lady was screaming, 'Get me out of this car, get this car off me.'" Vollmer looked around for what she had on hand. What she had was her delivery driver. "When I saw my delivery driver, I was like, 'Alright, he has muscles.'"

Across the street, at the Nolet Home Care Agency, Amelia Cannon heard the same scream and did the least sensible and most human thing available to her. "Once I heard her scream, 'Help,' I just ran outside and tried to lift up the car by myself," she said. An old Beetle weighs close to a ton. She got her hands under it anyway. Then other neighbours came out of their doors.

A FedEx truck was on the block. Carl Wise got out of it. He is the one who describes what happened next in the flattest language anybody used all week: "Picked up the Volkswagen Beetle on its side and drug the woman out and I told her, 'Don't move.'"

By the count Prospect Park police gave afterwards, seven people had their hands on that car. Shop owners, a care worker, a delivery driver, and officers who arrived, saw what was already under way and joined the line instead of waiting for equipment. They tipped the Beetle onto its side and pulled her clear.

"No special equipment, no training," Chief Dave Madonna said. "They just come over and use brute force to lift the vehicle." He called it heroism in its purest form. Then his department did something that matters more than the phrase: they started going through the footage to identify every person who had helped, so each of them could be thanked by name.

Nobody in that group had a plan. Vollmer sells signs. Cannon books home care visits. Wise delivers parcels. None of them knew the woman under the car; she lives in the next borough over. The whole rescue took less time than it takes to read about it.

She was taken to Lankenau Hospital and went into surgery for a broken collarbone and chest injuries. She is recovering. The driver of the Beetle had signalled, was not at fault and was not charged. The cyclist may end up with a citation. All of that is paperwork, and paperwork is not the story.

The story is the gap. Between the bang and the ambulance there were a few minutes with nobody official in them, and it was filled by whoever happened to be working on that block that morning.

"I'm no hero," Wise said. "I'm just a guy doing a job."

"I wouldn't say hero," Cannon said. "I just helped someone in need."

That is almost always how it sounds afterwards. The number is what stays with you. One person cannot lift a car. Seven people who work on the same street can, and every one of them was thirty seconds away.

That is what our map is for — not heroes in capes, but the seven people who are already on your street.

Sources: FOX 29 Philadelphia, CBS News Philadelphia, ABC News