“He wasn’t breathing. His heart was stopped,” Lauren told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
“His arm was pinned to his chest by the car.”
The jack that was propping the vehicle up had slipped. After screaming for her mother to call 911, a sudden strength propelled Lauren to miraculously lift the car up and shove it away, off her father’s body.
“[I] just kind of threw it, shoved my body as hard as I could, then I came back and dragged him out and started CPR,” she told WWBT, a local NBC affiliate.
Fresh from a CPR review session a few days earlier, Lauren tried to resuscitate her 210-pound father.
“It flashed, like, I’m going to lose my dad,” she said. “His eyes were open, he wasn’t responding to me. I knew I had to get his heart beating again and I had to get him breathing.
“I’m just telling him, talking to him. ‘You can’t leave me. Just stay with me. Keep breathing.’”
After two sets of mouth-to-mouth and three sets of compressions, Alec’s breath was restored, Lauren told the newspaper.
“I wouldn’t let anyone else touch him until the paramedics arrived,” she said, noting that a prayer circle had already begun in the driveway by the time her father was being loaded into an ambulance.
Lauren credits the CPR classes she took while working as a lifeguard with saving her father’s life.
“I can’t begin to say how important that training is; that’s one of the reasons I want people to know what happened,” she told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
“It saved my dad’s life. Losing him for me was not an option, and I just wasn’t going to allow it.”
