The Florida woman was inside her bedroom when someone hit the side of her house with their car.
Carmen Roman, a Florida health care aide, was inside her bedroom when she heard someone relentlessly blowing their car horn.
A little annoyed, she looked out the window to see what the racket was about, and her annoyance morphed into anxiety. There was a vehicle creeping across her lawn, and it was headed for her house.
Then she heard — and felt — something bang into her home.
She and her kids went running outside. "Oh my God," the mother of three said. "Somebody hit the house!"
Her first aid training slammed into overdrive. Surveillance video shows her frantically pulling open the driver's door and turning off the ignition key. The man behind the wheel was completely "out of it," she told InsideEdition.com Wednesday. "He was just stiff."
So Roman began pushing on his chest. She soon realized he wasn't breathing, and he didn't have a pulse. "I had to start CPR on him," she said. In his hand, she said, was a hypodermic needle. It appeared the man had overdosed, she said.
That didn't deter her from jumping in to help, she said. "I have close family members who have addiction" issues, she said. "I made sure the needle didn't touch me."
Officers from the Kissimmee Police Department arrived, followed by paramedics. Roman rattled off the number of chest compressions she'd done and the man's pulse rate, and "just got out of the way," she said.
"He wouldn't talk," she said. "He was just out of it."
Eventually, after about 20 minutes, the man started to come around. He made it to his feet and walked around his car. "He was fighting with the ambulance people, saying he didn't want to go to the hospital," she said. In the end, he went with them, she said.
She has no idea what was in the needle, she said. "We're waiting for the police report," she said. But her kids, ages 19, 12 and 8, think she's a hero. Roman said it was no big no deal.
"I was just there," said Roman, who spends her work days caring for the elderly in their homes. "He had a good luck charm."
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