'Guardian Angel' Rescue Worker Saves Same Woman Twice

Palermo , NY - - Duane Royal was sitting at home watching the Glenn Beck show sometime after midnight when his fire radio crackled: A car had rolled over on state Route 49 in Palermo and someone might be hurt.

The call was vague and the crash was about four miles away.

"I just had a sickening feeling in my stomach," says Royal, Pennellville's first assistant fire chief and only emergency medical technician. "I hardly ever go to calls in neighboring towns unless they ask me, but I just had a feeling. I had to go."

It wasn't until Royal got there that he realized the woman trapped inside the car was someone he had helped save a year earlier.

"Don't tell me Rhonda is in that car again," Royal said to Rhonda McEvers' boyfriend, who was standing outside the car.

She was.

"Rhonda, what are you doing to me?" he asked.

For the second time, Royal was the first firefighter and EMT at the scene of a crash on the same road, involving the same woman. Technically, he shouldn't have been at either crash both happened outside his fire district.

The first crash happened at 10:47 a.m. April 2, 2006, on a narrow stretch of Route 49. McEvers, a 23-year-old college student, had crashed her teal Buick Skylark into a tree at 55 mph.

Royal didn't realize the crash was about 500 yards outside his fire district and was the first on scene. He immediately called for a helicopter.

"I ran to the car and said, `Oh boy, we have a bad one,"' he says. "The motor was up to the dashboard. There was blood everywhere. And the driver's legs were trapped under the dashboard."

Royal didn't know McEvers or her family that well at the time, but he knew she needed help.

"She was moaning and groaning. Her leg was broke. She had a bad cut on her hand," he says. "She was lucky to be alive."

McEvers told a state trooper she thought she had fallen asleep, but she's still not sure exactly what happened that day.

"When you drive a road every day, your mind takes over," she says. "I was wide awake and the next thing I knew I freaked out and crashed into a tree. I remember swerving. It was like a dream. I think I thought I was going off the road or in the wrong direction."

McEvers remembers opening her eyes and seeing blood on her right hand. The next thing she remembers are the firefighters cutting the roof off her car.

"The whole time I was in and out of consciousness," she says. "My head hurt and my left leg was in immense pain. It hurt to move even the tiniest bit."

McEvers had fractured some bones in her right hand. She also had a broken left leg.

She spent the next three months in a wheelchair, and depended on friends and local firefighters including Royal to help her up and down three steps to her mother and stepfather's mobile home.

By September, McEvers was back at work at a local Wal-Mart and taking classes again at the State University College at Oswego. In early December, she started dating 27-year-old Chris Briggs, whom she'd had a crush on for years.

Her life seemed back on track.

As Briggs drove McEvers home from work at 12:40 a.m. July 7, he swerved to avoid a deer.

"I thought, `Oh no, here we go again,"' McEvers says.

The car caught the edge of the right side of the road, rolled twice and landed upright. Briggs got out of the car and asked McEvers if she was all right.

She wasn't.

The roof of her mom's white Mercury Sable was crushed about a foot and a half down, just barely touching her head. Her feet and legs were stuck under the dashboard. And blood gushed down her face.

She told him to call for help.

A few minutes later, McEvers heard Royal's voice.

"I knew I wasn't in Pennellville anymore. I was like, he can't be here. But he is," she says. "I felt safe."

But Royal was worried.

He smelled gasoline, and the odor was growing stronger. He knew the gas fumes could cause the car to ignite at any moment.

"All I could do was hope and pray it didn't catch fire," says Royal, a 46-year-old father of two.