Jerry Wixom was having a stroke.
A 21-year-old man with special needs has been hailed a hero after saving his next door neighbor’s life in Idaho.
Jerry Wixom, 72, was shoveling his driveway when he started to lose feeling in his feet and realized he couldn’t stand. He was stuck outside with no cellphone.
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“It dawned on me that I was having a problem, maybe even a stroke, so I held onto my snow thrower and backed up very carefully to the garage,” Wixom told East Idaho News. “The snow pile in front of my house and the drifts were so high that you couldn’t see into the garage from the street or sidewalk.”
It was then that he spotted his neighbor, Ethan Johnson, out shoveling snow in another neighbor’s yard, as he often does out of the kindness of his heart.
“I yelled to him that I needed help, and he came running. It truly was an act of God that he was there,” Wixom said.
Johnson ran over to Wixom, who told him to get his mother.
“All of a sudden he came in the front door and I have never heard Ethan in such a panic,” said Michele Mangum, Johnson’s mom. “He kept saying, ‘Mom, Mom, Mom! Jerry, Jerry, Jerry – Jerry needs help!'”
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The family was able to carry Wixom to his front porch and call an ambulance.
He later found he had suffered two strokes.
“Had he not been there, who knows?” Wixom said. “I might have turned into a Popsicle that day. Fortunately, two people came together that day, and he saved my life. What more can I say?”
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