LEMOORE, Calif. (FOX26) — A motorcyclist is recovering tonight after a valley man saved his life.
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Around 3 Sunday morning, Gabriel Cruz said he and his friend were stuck on the side of the freeway in Lemoore waiting for a tow truck – when a motorcycle crashed right in front of them.
The crash happened off Highway 41 and Kansas.
“This dude flew by on his Harley,” he said. “And then he gets to the 41. He flies over the street. He doesn’t stop and disappears… his lights disappear.”
Cruz and his friend immediately jump out of their car and start running toward the crash.
“So I’m running down the canal, and I see his tail light in the canal,” he said.
Cruz says he didn’t even think twice and jumped into the canal.
“I dragged him to the bank, and I started patting him on his chest real hard, and when I hit him real hard, he kind of coughed a little bit, and it I was like, oh, he’s alive. He’s alive. So I so I and I started doing chest compressions,” he said. “I felt like we won a flight or something, like we won.”
He humbly says he was just in the right place at the right time.
We broke down out there twice. So it was like, so many things that happened for me to be in this, that position to be there to save that dude.
Cruz doesn’t feel like a hero; he just had an opportunity to “pay it forward.”
He said fire crews were able to help him pull the motorcyclist out of the canal and airlift him to a local hospital.