Teen comes to rescue
Published: March 14, 2007
Nathan McPartlin missed curfew one night in January 2006 and for good reason. The resident of Trenton, now 17, was saving someone’s life.
Initially, that story seemed too fantastic for Nathan’s mom, Kathy McPartlin, who got the call from Nathan explaining why he wasn’t home in time for his hockey coach’s pregame night curfew check at 11:30 p.m.
“I told her I was in the back of a police car because I had just pulled a woman from her car on the railroad tracks. She didn’t believe me. She wanted to talk to the cop,” recalled Nathan, a senior at Trenton High School.
It was true and now Nathan is to be honored with a 2007 American Red Cross Heroes Award. He is to receive the Young Courage Award at a dinner March 22; 10 others will be getting awards.
It was around 11:30 p.m. Jan. 26 when Nathan was headed home and saw a woman in a two-door Jeep Cherokee pull onto Lathrop Road near Van Horn in Trenton going the wrong way.
Instead of turning right, Nathan said, “she went straight and hit a pole. After she hit the pole I backed my car up, parked it on the street and I ran across the street.”
“I was telling her to get out, that she shouldn’t drive. I didn’t want her to hurt herself,” he recalled.
She yelled at him to leave her alone. She said she didn’t need his help. She did.
“She backed up to leave and her tires got stuck in the tracks,” he said.
Nathan was calling 911 when he heard a train coming. He made the rescue by “kind of like hugging her, freeing her legs and getting her out very slowly.”
The 6-foot-2, 215-pound hockey defenseman and football player carried the woman away from the tracks. They were just reaching safety when “the train hit the car and pushed it like a hundred feet. I got hit by glass from the car.”
The police arrived. Nathan gave a statement. The driver, in her late 50s, was later charged with drunken driving.
Many weeks after the incident, Nathan heard from the woman he saved.
“She had to wait until she went to court to call me so she wouldn’t be tampering with a witness. Her daughter called,” he said. “She started crying and thanked me for what I did. She got on the phone and she called me her angel. She said thank you for saving her life.”
Since that night the story has been told again and again and Nathan has received heroism awards from the City of Trenton and Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
“It’s not embarrassing,” Nathan, who is headed to Western Michigan University, said of the attention. “I’m proud of it.”
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