A woman is still alive because Shane Luehm of Arcadia doesn’t just keep motorcycling along, minding his own business.
On April 10, Luehm saved the life of a woman who was trying to get hit by a train at a Cairo railroad crossing.
Luehm, who was traveling north on his motorcycle, saw the woman sitting on the tracks. He thought she needed help because perhaps she’d fallen or gotten her foot stuck.
As the crossing arms came down, the woman got up and started walking toward the train.
Shane Luehm
Luehm, 23, got off his bike and grabbed the woman before the train could hit her.
As he picked her up, the woman put up some resistance.
“She fought me for a little bit,” he said.
But Luehm is a former Marine and the woman is 48. “It wasn’t that much of a fight,” he said.
She told Luehm that one of her daughters had died. She wasn’t able to make it to the funeral that day and had to watch it on Zoom.
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Luehm says he was just in the right place at the right time.
The incident happened in the middle of the afternoon. After pulling the woman to safety, he waited for a Hall County deputy to arrive.
Luehm, a 2017 graduate of Ord High School, was discharged in October after four years in the Marines. A rifleman, he was stationed at Camp Pendleton in California.
He is a member of the Arcadia Volunteer Fire Department.
Earlier that day, Luehm attended a fundraiser for the department, after which he went for a ride on his motorcycle. When he discovered the woman on the tracks, he was on his way home.
He works for Trotters in Arcadia.
His boss, Jesse Trotter, thinks people should know about Luehm’s life-saving effort. The feat, Trotter said, meant a lot to the woman’s family as well as the train engineer who probably would have witnessed it.
“I believe Shane Luehm is a hero and we all need to know about the heroes that walk among us,” Trotter wrote in an email.