Good Samaritans rush into traffic to save unconscious Florida driver

Laurie Rabyor can remember May 5 only in flashes.

There is the flash of getting help from an emergency medical worker and the flash of being shuffled around an emergency room. But absent from her memory is the most important part of that day, when a crowd of strangers risked their lives to save her after she passed out while driving home from work in South Florida.

Instead, Rabyor has seen the dramatic rescue only in traffic camera footage that police in Boynton Beach, Florida, shared last week in an effort to identify the good Samaritans who ran in front of her car to stop it as it cut a slow, perilous path through a busy intersection.

At a ceremony hosted by the Police Department on Friday, Rabyor met many of her rescuers for the first time, including the woman who grabbed a dumbbell from her car and the man who used it to break one of Rabyor’s car windows.

The rescuers were almost all strangers, except for Jannette Rivera, who works with Rabyor and noticed that Rabyor’s car was drifting through the crosswalk, interfering with traffic.

Rivera, 51, decided within seconds that something was wrong, put her car in park, ran into traffic and yelled for help, rousing others to assist.

“I thank God for that woman,” Rabyor, 63, of West Palm Beach, Florida, said Saturday. “I can never repay her.”

Rabyor said she had been fasting in preparation for a colonoscopy and lost consciousness while on her way home from her job at City Shade Co., a manufacturer of custom blinds and shades. She has worked in the drapery department there, with Rivera, for about three years. She said she had been hospitalized for two days after the rescue because she had overhydrated while preparing for the procedure.

A little over a minute after Rivera first ran from her car, a man, David Formica, broke open the window of Rabyor’s car with the dumbbell. Another person climbed through the window to unlock the front passenger door, police said.

The group then pushed the car into a nearby parking lot, where a nurse provided medical attention until the Fire Department arrived, police said.