Young man responds to call for help
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Updated: November 24, 2009 4:23 PM
A frigid rain was falling on Branden Pratt as he plodded his way home along Lougheed Highway the night of Nov. 3, when, in between the clots of traffic whizzing by, he caught a muffled plea coming from the bushes beside the busy road.
As he approached, the cries grew louder until he could distinctly hear someone call out, “Help me.”
Peering into the darkness, he could see the faint outline of a body in the bushes. Pratt waded into the prickles, where he found a shivering woman in her 70s lying on the ground. She was shivering, her skin freezing to the touch.
“She was just wearing a nightgown, and she still had her hospital bracelet on,” says the Maple Ridge teen.
Disoriented, she had wandered away from the nearby Ridge Meadows Hospital.
Pratt picked her up and helped her walk out of the bushes to the roadside, before running across the street to call 9-1-1 from a convenience store.
Stay with her until help arrives, the operator told him. He ran back and stayed by the woman’s side until the paramedics arrived.
“We’re all proud of the fact he might have very well saved her life,” said Michelle Schmidt, vice-principal of School District No. 42’s Connex alternative learning centre, where Pratt is currently finishing Grade 12.
“He’s a good kid. He’s had a pretty rough upbringing, but he’s making progress.”
Brandon Pratt is the younger brother of Darnell Darcy Pratt, who in March 2005, while driving a stolen car, struck Grant De Patie when the gas station attendant tried to stop him fleeing an Esso station in Maple Ridge without paying for gas. Darnell fled in the car, dragging the 24-year-old De Patie 7.5 kilometres to his death.
Ridge Meadows RCMP said the woman was returned safely to the hospital, but wouldn’t speculate as to whether she would have survived the night.
Schmidt doubts it.
“It was freezing cold,” she said.
Temperatures dropped below zero that night, according Environment Canada.
“There’s no way she could have lasted the night,” Schmidt.
Branden Pratt says he was just doing what came naturally. He saw someone who was hurt, so he helped them.
“There was a guy walking ahead of me who stopped and looked, too. But he just kept on going,” said Pratt.
“I don’t know how you could just leave someone there.”
