On the way home from their game at Buffalo on Saturday (a 28-22 win to bring the Falcons to 3-2 overall), a car swerved in front of the caravan of Bowling Green team buses on I-90 and hit the center divider. Moments later the car caught on fire right in front of the first team bus.
Luckily for the driver involved, Dino Babers and an athletic trainer saw it all happen and were quick to respond.
“The bus driver asked for permission to stop the bus, and I gave it to him - but I told him not to stop the other three buses,” Babers told the Toledo Blade.
“Then he asked to go check out the car and see if the driver was hurt. I told him no, because if he was hurt there wouldn’t be anyone to drive the bus home.”
It was then that Babers and athletic trainer Chelsea Lowe got out of the bus to check on the driver and those in the car. That's when they noticed the smoke. “We knew whoever was in the car wasn’t just going to walk away and have everything be okay,” Lowe noted.
Babers and Lowe dragged the driver, a 25-year old local woman, about 30 feet away from the car, to a safer location. Lowe attended to the injured woman, while Babers went back to the car to retrieve the woman's purse, keys, and other valuables.
Interestingly enough, the Blade points out that Babers was in a similar situation where a good samaritan came to the rescue when he packed up a U-Haul to drive from Arizona to Illinois for a coaching job at Eastern Illinois. Babers spent a lot of time and energy trying to pay the couple back for rescuing him, but instead had to settle on promising the who helped save him that if he was ever driving driving and saw someone in trouble on the side of the road, he would stop and assist.
Big ups to Babers for coming to the rescue here, and even more impressive is the fact that he wouldn't let the bus driver help out because "if he was hurt there wouldn’t be anyone to drive the bus home.” That's some really sharp thinking in the face of adversity.