[Cagdu] FW: USA: The power of 8 strangers

Mon Mar 12 20:17:38 PDT 2007

Tina, Nina and Sicily

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Subject: USA: The power of 8 strangers

This is the happy ending story of a Seeing Eye
graduate who was hit by a car last year. 
>From the Chicago Sun Times-- 
Chicago, Illinois, USA: 

The power of 8 strangers
March 5, 2007
BY
TOM McNAMEE
Sun-Times Columnist

How strange to see the blind woman kneeling to pet her
guide dog. How strange to see her even walking again,
breathing normally, let alone kneeling down
and standing straight.

Here she is, at Winchester and Foster on the North
Side, listening for sounds of traffic before crossing
at a stop sign.

It was at this very corner one year ago Tuesday that,
by any reckoning of physics and fate, she should have
died.

"She was mangled like a pretzel," says Tom Keevers,
the man who saved her life.

"She was under the car, and it was crushing her. There
was a lot of blood. I could not imagine she was even
alive."

But she was. And she is.

And now we know just how many Chicagoans it takes to
pick up and move a 3,100-pound Acura.

Tom Keevers plus seven.

In a pinch.

Can't remember being hit
It was midafternoon on March 6, 2006, and Heloise
Bouille, then 47, was taking a walk with her guide
dog, Annette. Bouille worked from home as a
translator,
turning French into English, and she always looked
forward to these walking breaks -- the exercise, the
city sounds and smells, the wind on her face.

At Winchester and Foster, Bouille took particular care
because, as she well knew, a blind person crossing a
street in a big city faces as much danger at
a small intersection with stop signs as at a busy
intersection with traffic lights. When there are
lights, you can listen for the full cycle of signal
changes -- from red to green to red again -- and know
exactly when it's safest to step from the curb.

After listening carefully and checking with Annette,
Bouille began to cross Winchester.

And that, mercifully, is all she remembers.

It was an older Acura, driven by an 18-year-old kid
who worked in a restaurant. He must have blown the
stop sign.

She doesn't remember being hit. Or being mowed under.
Or being dragged 30 yards down Foster.

And, of course, she never heard the woman on the
sidewalk in the Muslim veil scream.

"There is a woman under the car," the woman cried,
waving her arms. "There is a woman under the car."

'A lot of crazy people'
Keevers, 43, was having a beer with a couple of
friends in K's Dugout, a tavern on the corner. After a
day of selling ads for the Yellow Pages, he was
celebrating
one friend's birthday.

Looking out the window, he saw the screaming woman.

"Chicago," he thought to himself, "has a lot of crazy
people."

But the woman kept screaming, and something told
Keevers this was different.

"I'm gonna step outside and see what the problem is,"
he said.

Keevers' dad was a Chicago cop. Maybe that's where he
gets it. Three years ago, Tom got an award from the
FBI for tackling a bank robber on Lawrence Ave.

"What's wrong?" he asked, approaching in that wary way
of a Chicago lifer.

"There's a woman under that car!" the woman in the
veil cried again. "I saw a lady walking across the
street and, all the sudden, she disappeared."

Turning to look at the car, Keevers saw the dog first.
It was crying and trying to crawl under the car.

And then he saw the broken woman.

"There is no way," he thought. "She's completely
crushed."

But he had to try.

'Call 911'
Keevers jumped in front of a CTA bus and shouted,
"Stop!"

He barked to the driver: "Call 911."

Two men on the bus ran out to help.

Keevers called his friends out of the bar. He waved
down two or three more cars.

Now there were eight men, mostly strangers to each
other. But acting as one, they surrounded the car,
reached down to the chassis and got firm grips.

"On the count of three," Keevers said. "One . . . two
. . . three."

They lifted the car, staggered to the middle of the
street and dropped it.

Heloise Bouille was free, though twisted and horribly
still. Annette rushed to her side.

An ambulance roared up. Keevers felt sure they were
too late.

But then he saw a bloody bubble burst from the woman's
mouth.

She was breathing.

'Am I OK?'
Bouille suffered severe brain injury, a ruptured
diaphragm, a collapsed lung, multiple broken ribs, a
demolished femur, a broken pelvis and two broken bones
in her back. She is held together today with metal
plates and screws.

But to the amazement of every cop, lawyer and doctor
who has followed her story, she has made a remarkable
recovery.

First she walked down a hospital hall. Then around the
block. Then, encouraged by her husband, Robert Hall,
who also is blind, she went back to taking her
long city walks. With Annette, of course.

"It took me so long to recover," Bouille told me last
week. "The physical part is one thing, but the
emotional part is another. There is always this
thought:
'Am I OK?'"

As for the teenager who was driving that day, he was
nowhere to be seen at the moment Keevers and the
others came to Bouille's aid. But he did not run away.
The police questioned him on the scene.

The young man was recently convicted in Traffic Court
on two violations stemming from this accident --
failure to exercise due care with a pedestrian and
failure to exercise due care with a pedestrian with a
disability. He was fined $500.

What's the kid's name? Hope you don't mind, but I
don't think I'll say. From what I hear, he's not so
bad -- just a teenager.

'Absolutely flabbergasted'
And then there are all the heroes. I hate that word --
hero. So overused.

But what's a hero if not that Muslim woman who cried
for help, if not Keevers, if not every man who lifted
that car?

"If those guys hadn't lifted that car, Heloise would
have been dead or brain-damaged for life," said her
lawyer, Jim Zouras. "She was moments -- seconds
-- from being dead."

Ble said she wonders if there might be some big award
the city could give Keevers.

"I am absolutely flabbergasted by what he did," she
said.

I asked Keevers if he could remember what everybody
did once the ambulance had rushed Bouille away.

The guys from the bus, he said, got back on the bus.
And the bus driver drove off. And the guys in the cars
got back on the road.

And, I asked, what about you?

"I went back in the bar," Keevers said, "and had a
beer."

Tom McNamee's "The Chicago Way" column runs on
Mondays.

C Copyright 2007 Sun-Times News Group |

http://www.suntimes
<http://www.suntimes.com/news/mcnamee/283022,CST-NWS-mcnamee05.article>
.com/news/mcnamee/283022,CST-NWS-mcnamee05.article

(
http://www.suntimes
<http://www.suntimes.com/news/mcnamee/283022,CST-NWS-mcnamee05.article>
.com/news/mcnamee/283022,CST-NWS-mcnamee05.article)

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