Kentucky student gives first aid to gunshot victim on way home from school

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A high school student’s quick thinking on her way home from school may have saved the life of a stranger.

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Nylaia Carter, 16, was with her father in the car after he picked her up from school on Wednesday when they saw a man in trouble on the side of the road, WAVE reported.

“We saw this man laying on the sidewalk and my dad had said that he was bleeding a lot, and he probably had gotten shot,” Carter told WLKY. “I was nervous when I saw all the blood, but I just knew I had to help that man. It felt like it was seconds. It felt like, if I don’t stop him from bleeding now, anything can happen.”

“I was proud of my daughter because she told me to, ‘Pull over, Dad,’” Nylaia’s father, Adam, told WAVE. “And I didn’t want to pull over. It had been a long day. I wanted to get home.”

But Nylaia convinced him, and when her father stopped the car, Nylaia jumped out and immediately got to work. Nylaia had taken “stop the bleed” classes offered by the public school district, the Louisville Courier Journal reported. She told the newspaper that she followed the protocol: introducing herself, telling him what she planned to do, and asking for consent.

Nylaia used her sweatshirt to make a tourniquet and successfully stopped the man’s bleeding and kept him conscious until paramedics arrived, WAVE reported.

Nylaia didn’t stop there: while waiting for the paramedics, Nylaiah taught another bystander how to apply pressure to the wound, so that she could then check the victim’s pulse, the Courier Journal reported.

Nylaia was reunited with the man she helped save when she and her father went to visit him in the hospital, WAVE reported. The victim was surprised to learn his hero was only 16.

“He remembered her being there,” Adam told WAVE. “But she had a book bag, so he thought she was the paramedic. So we had a chance to talk to him and pray with him and I think that she has a lifelong friend now.”

“Yeah, I did what I was supposed to do,” Nylaia told WAVE. “He’s alive and that’s all that matters.”

Nylaia told WLKY that she wants to go to college to study physical therapy, with the goal of working as a physical therapist for a professional sports team.

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