Paul Jackson wasn’t looking to be a hero as he drove down Interstate 5 last week. Among other errands, he was supposed to be picking up his wife’s birthday cake. Then he spotted a white SUV suddenly cutting across three lanes near Fife, Washington, and realized something was very wrong.
Inside the SUV, as KCPQ-TV reported, the driver was experiencing a medical emergency. Slumped over the wheel with her eyes rolled back, she was unconscious as the vehicle sped down the highway. In the back seat, strapped into a car seat, was her young son—wide awake and terrified. The SUV had already struck another vehicle and was repeatedly scraping along the concrete divider, becoming a multi-car pileup waiting to happen with no one in control.
Photo credit: Tahamie Farooqui/Unsplash
Jackson, of Roy, Washington, had exactly one tool at his disposal: his own car.
“My rescue car, my Batmobile, is a Kia Forte,” he told KCPQ-TV. “Somebody had to do something.”
He pulled alongside the runaway SUV, positioned his car so it could make contact, and used it to guide and pin the SUV against the concrete barrier until both vehicles came to a controlled stop. He then shifted the SUV into park, helped the frightened boy to safety, and stayed with the unconscious driver until first responders arrived.
It came at a cost. His car sustained significant damage in the collision—the kind of crash most people spend their lives instinctively trying to avoid. Jackson drove straight into it on purpose.
“It wasn’t something I really even thought about,” he said. “I just did it.”
He’s also quite a character. Jackson showed up to the moment in a leather vest, talks about his economy sedan like it’s crime-fighting equipment, and then had to deal with a very ordinary problem: he was late picking up his wife’s birthday cake. To prove he had a legitimate excuse, he texted her photos from the crash scene.
The entire incident was captured on a cell-phone video by another motorist and later confirmed by the Washington State Patrol. A woman suffered a medical emergency in the worst possible place, her child was moments from catastrophe, and a stranger driving a Kia Forte decided the acceptable outcome was the one in which he wrecked his own car instead.
He was right. Both survived because he didn’t hesitate.
