Heroic Bellflower Navy Corpsman Saves Life
HM2 Lawrence Pacheco
On January 8th at 3:00 a.m., Navy Hospital Corpsman Second Class Lawrence Pacheco was driving on the off-ramp from the southbound 605 freeway to the westbound 91 freeway when he noticed an overturned vehicle.
"The accident must have just happened because the wheels were still turning," said Pacheco.
He immediately stopped and assisted two individuals out of the vehicle, but one man remained trapped inside, bleeding badly. He could smell something burning and saw smoke, but he didn't see any flames, so he kicked in the front windshield and crawled in. The arm of the trapped man had been severed. Not finding anything he could use as a tourniquet, he took his own shirt off, spun it to make a quick rope and tied off the man's arm two inches above the injury. Someone threw him a screwdriver and he used that to cinch the tourniquet until the bleeding stopped.
Pacheco checked the injured man's vital signs. "He had a weak pulse from the loss of a lot of blood and signs of shock, but he was conscious," said the 24-year-old corpsman. "So I talked to him to keep him calm. He was strong and didn't yell or anything like that. I found out he had a daughter, and told him he would see his daughter again. You have to always give them hope."
Pacheco kept the man calm until the paramedics arrived, and then assisted the emergency crew with the extraction.
"The paramedics told me, 'you know what, you saved the guy's life,'" said Pacheco. "I felt pretty good about that."
At the time of the accident, the sailor lived in Bellflower, but he and his wife and three children just recently moved to Cerritos. He did spend most of his grade school years in Bellflower and attended Thomas Jefferson elementary school. Pacheco is stationed at Camp Pendleton’s 31 Area Branch Medical Clinic, which is part the of the Navy Hospital Camp Pendleton system. He served as a Marine unit’s medic during two seven-month deployments to Iraq, and has saved lives on the battlefield, but he said this was different.
"You have a lot of help in the field," said the corpsman. "And you have supplies, your medic bag. At the accident I didn’t have anything but myself. I guess I saved the guy's life with just the shirt off my back and a screwdriver."
