Bradley Kupris is a craftsman of fine carpentry, but he produced his masterpiece when he put the finishing touches on saving a life on a quiet street in Creve Coeur, Illinois.
The 30-year-old carpenter and sometimes musician, former Boy Scout and man on the edge of the spectrum ended up at the center of a story in which he overcame massive amounts of blood, crisis, cobbled together a solution with a backpack and saved a young girl’s life as she lay dying on the street.
“It looked impossible, the amount of blood,” Kupris said. “When I got there, it was as if someone took a couple milk gallons and scattered it on the street. There was a young girl laying there. She was in shock.
“I knew she was dying.”
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A bicycle ride to terror
Stephanie Paluska had just finished her second day as a freshman at East Peoria High School, went home and grabbed her bicycle.
The Creve Coeur resident loves riding her bike, but it had been broken and unusable for several months. But finally repaired, it was good to go at 6:45 p.m. on Aug. 15, a 77-degree day, a bit windy and rain gathering in the evening forecast in the village located just outside Peoria.
She went pouring down the Marquette Street hill. “Too fast,” she thought. “I always go fast, but this is too fast.”
That’s the last thing she can remember from a ride that turned into terror. She lost control of the bike and hurtled to the ground. One of the handles on the bike was missing its rubber endcap, the hollow metal pipe exposed.
That pipe drove itself into her right groin area and struck her femoral artery, the main supply of blood from the heart to the lower extremities. A severed femoral artery will often cause a person to bleed out, lose consciousness and possibly die within 2-10 minutes.
“I’m a little overwhelmed,” she said. “I like to go down that hill fast … I remember I couldn’t stop screaming. I remember other people screaming and that’s it, really. I’m not sure what happened. I felt myself slipping away and the last thing I thought as I lost consciousness was that I died.”
‘By a miracle we still have her’
Stephanie Paluska, 14, loves to sing. She played summer league softball in East Peoria and wants to play volleyball in high school.
“She is the most pure-hearted person, wears her heart on her sleeve and finds love in everyone she sees and everything she does,” said Donnie Van Winkle, 24, her half-brother and, presently, foster parent and guardian. “It would have been heartbreaking if we had lost her. By a miracle we still have her. She likes trying everything. Likes singing her heart out.”
Paluska likes to sing to an artist named Savannah Dexter. Although when asked what song she’d choose to sing if she could only sing one song the rest of her life, she picked Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain.”
“I just like trying new things,” said Paluska, speaking last month from her hospital bed at OSF in Peoria, with her brother alongside. “I don’t watch TV, but I go live on Instagram singing, though. I have 75 posts there and 453 followers. I love to do that.”
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Stephanie has older sisters, Bethany, Melodie and Mackenzie. Older brothers, Donnie, Devan and younger brother Zachary.
“We’re all half-siblings,” laughed Donnie Van Winkle, who installs fiber optic cable around central Illinois for Perley Cable Construction. “She’s still wondering what happened. Trying to understand why she’s in the hospital. When she got here, she was in extreme critical condition, she had nine blood transfusions. OSF’s Dr. Kumar did the emergency surgery at 7:45 p.m. that night for about three hours.
“She’s made it out of ICU. We thank the doctor and everyone who cared for her. And Brad … words can’t thank him enough for being in the right place at the right time. He knew what to do to save her life.”
A guitar player, Boy Scout, carpenter saves a singer
Brad Kupris is a 2012 Pekin High School graduate who grew up in Green Valley. He has a lifetime around farming and ranching and has spent 14 years now in construction, working as a fine carpenter doing finishing work.
“I do everything from fine instruments to skyscrapers,” he said. “I’m just a semi-practical guy, single, no kids, diagnosed long ago with ADD, and I’m pretty sure I might be right on the edge of the spectrum.”
Kupris also knows his way around the stage, referring to himself as a semi-professional guitar player. He’s been part of local alternative rock, rock and roll and blues bands Felix, and Memorial for a Dove.
His father, Bradley Sr., died in 2023. Bradley Jr. reflected on his lifepath, how he was taught as a Boy Scout the creed to be prepared, how his father instilled in him not to be a spectator.
“I grew up with a lot of healthy situational awareness in construction and farming environments,” Kupris said. “I was raised to not be a guilty bystander. People will see a car wreck and drive on by. I’ve never forgotten that Scouts motto.
“So I took advantage of watching a handful of YouTube videos and a little bit of reading and some peers in medicine to learn a little bit of first aid. I’m in an occupation that can be dangerous and I’m traveling a lot, need to be ready for something like this. I wanted to be ready to give someone a Band-Aid or be ready to help in a car crash.”
A hero and his backpack
On the evening of Aug. 15, Kupris was in a Creve Coeur neighborhood at the house of Gary Roe, doing some wood-working. Roe had been injured years ago in a construction accident, and today is wheelchair-bound. Kupris wanted to help out Roe.
“It was one of those no-sidewalk neighborhoods in Creve Coeur, a back residential street,” Kupris said. “Quiet, car every 30 minutes kind of road. I was inside the house wrapping up a long day after a hectic week.
“I stopped for a moment to reorganize, and I heard a commotion outside, sounded like yelling or something. I trusted my gut. Something didn’t feel right about it. Jogged out to the road and searched, then saw a car parked a little ways into an intersection and a guy standing there looking at something. It looked like a bike on the ground. I thought I saw someone laying there.”
Kupris’ studying of emergency first-aid response had led him to create a homemade crisis kit in a backpack. He kept it in the back of his truck, always there.
“Socks, a couple spare shirts, a phone charger, glue sticks and a first aid kit,” he said of the backpack’s contents. “Basic medical stuff in the kit. I keep some tools in there, too, like a knife. The rest I learned from watching videos and reading. I keep it with me everywhere I go.”
He sprinted a block, followed a trail of blood and saw Paluska laying on the ground. He grabbed the knife and cut the side of her shorts, noting the girl was in shock and fading.
“The whole thing looked impossible, couldn’t be real,” he said. “I saw something that looked like a rifle wound on her upper thigh. I swiveled my head looking for a piece of metal in the area that was out of place. The unprotected end of her handlebar had acted like an apple-coring device that carved a very deep hole out of her.”
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Kupris grabbed a shirt out of his backpack and applied pressure. One of Paluska’s brothers helped him open gauze packages so he could pack the puncture wound.
“Family members arrived and kept her calm. Whether it’s a hole in a hose or a pipe or a major artery, you clamp it shut,” Kupris said. “I had a commercially made tourniquet in my kit, but I couldn’t use it because the (wound) was so high up near her groin.”
Kupris quickly packed compressed gauze into the hole and reapplied pressure, essentially doing a push up on the wound and holding it for about 15 minutes.
Her life, in those minutes, was literally in his hands.
“There was no time for gloves, no time to waste at all. So much blood on the ground. We were kind of approaching one liter lost, which is where things get very critical.”
A man nearby had called 911, and a woman, who Kupris says was a nurse, eventually spelled him in his efforts to put pressure on the wound until emergency responders arrived.
“The farming world, construction world, I’ve seen people hit with objects, seen people fall, I always seem to be around these things,” Kupris said. “It’s somewhere between bad luck and good luck, I guess. Whether it’s animals or humans, I’ve always had a will to help. The more you are around people in dangerous situations, the more you have an opportunity to help.”
A life saved, and a message delivered
Kupris has reflected and said he wasn’t doing anything above and beyond what anyone would do. He’s just thankful he’s learned some skills and worked to be prepared when the moment arrived.
“It’s no more inconvenient than a backpack in your truck,” Kupris said. “I’ve seen car accidents or obscure incidents. It’s like movies where people stand around a lot, hoping help shows up or someone else knows what to do.
“I wanted to be that someone. I’m so glad I could be there for Stephanie.”
Said her brother, Donnie Van Winkle: “Brad and his backpack saved Stephanie’s life.”
Stephanie Paluska flew down that hill in Creve Coeur in a flash on Aug. 15. Lucky for her, there was a real-life superhero in Bradley Kupris waiting at the other end.
“I’m a little bit overwhelmed by all he did,” Paluska said. “I’m so grateful. I never met him before. He just came in and helped me. I get that it’s a good thing to help people. But I had no idea who this dude was. I thought I was going to die.
“Hopefully I can meet him and thank him and tell him, ‘I’m alive because of you.’ “
Dave Eminian is the Journal Star sports columnist, and covers Bradley men’s basketball, the Rivermen and Chiefs. He writes the Cleve In The Eve sports column for pjstar.com. He can be reached at 686-3206 or deminian@pjstar.com. Follow him on X.com @icetimecleve.
