LAKE STEVENS – When he stepped outside, Gary Estes heard the screams.
It was 3:15 a.m. Friday, and a sound like someone smashing a TV set had startled the Lake Stevens man from his sleep. He shook awake his wife, Sandra, and they rushed outside.
“I heard someone screaming. It was awful. It was total anguish,” he said.
He dashed toward the sounds to North Davies Road, just north of Wyatt County Park.
In the dim light of the streetlights and the beam of a flashlight he had taken with him, Estes saw what had happened. Twenty feet of skid marks led to a crumpled 2003 Suzuki motorcycle that had crashed against a 2-foot brick wall.
Another 20 feet from the motorcycle was a man lying flat on his back, arms to his side and screaming in pain. The bottom half of his right leg had been severed in the crash.
“It stunned me,” Estes said. “He kept shouting: ‘Help me! Help me!’”
Estes whipped off his belt and tied it tightly around the man’s upper leg. He didn’t have any formal medical training other than basic first aid, but his gut reaction was to stop the bleeding.
Estes and a neighbor woman worked swiftly to apply the tourniquet and held a towel against the man’s leg.
“He stayed fairly calm,” Estes said. “He didn’t realize his leg was gone. I don’t think he knew what was going on.”
Five minutes later, an ambulance arrived, and within 30 minutes the victim was on a helicopter to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
Thanks to Estes, the paramedics didn’t have much to do when they got to the crash scene. Estes said they checked to make sure the belt was fastened tightly and told him, “Good job.”
Estes’ quick response likely saved the man’s life, Snohomish County sheriff’s deputy Dave Hayes said.
The crash victim probably would have bled to death without the tourniquet, Hayes said.
Police didn’t release the man’s name or his condition Friday evening.
Estes was a little shaken up Friday, saying he had dreams about the accident after going back to bed that night. But he said his actions weren’t anything spectacular. He only reacted the same way he hopes someone would react if he were in an accident.
“I did what I could,” he said.
His wife also ran to the crash scene after her husband. Sandra Estes said even though her husband has a weak heart, he “sprinted down our driveway like a bat out of hell” after he heard the screams.
“I think he saved his life,” she said of the injured man.
Sandra Estes still hears the echoes of the man’s screams.
“I’ll never get that sound out of my head,” she said. “It was like you were in the middle of the woods and you didn’t hear anything but the screams. Everything froze in time.”
Reporter Chris Collins: 425-339-3436 or ccollins@ heraldnet.com.
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