SAN ANTONIO – A bar worker and former nurse’s assistant jumped into action to help keep a woman alive after a crash right outside the R&J Bar in south Bexar County.
Emily Salinas heard the crash but thought it was a delivery truck until someone told her to call 911.
The head-on crash involving four people sent two people to the hospital with serious injuries. It happened around 3 p.m. Thursday on Pleasanton Road, 5.5 miles south of Loop 410.
Salinas ran to the driver of a black Toyota who was pinned in her car.
“Her driver-side door was pinned to her leg. I know she was losing a lot of blood,” Salinas said.
Salinas said the woman’s passenger, a blind man, was alert and talking. She also checked on the driver of a white Ford SUV, who was also hurt, but the woman in the Toyota was in a worse situation.
“I was, like, ‘You need to open your eyes.’ In Spanish (I said), ‘Habre los ojos. No se duerma.’ She kept opening her eyes, and that’s when I noticed she was breathing differently,” Salinas said.
Salinas continued to talk to the woman, prayed with her and started trying to reach relatives on the woman’s cellphone. Someone finally answered.
“That could happen to anyone -- my mother, me, my son -- and it breaks my heart that someone could go through that in the blink of an eye,” Salinas said.
Salinas stayed with the woman and the woman on the other side of the phone until the medical transport helicopter carried her away.
Salinas, who’s also a mother, recalled looking up in the middle of the scene and seeing others taking pictures and video while the victim was in a vulnerable stage.
“Have a heart. This could be you, your daughter. Would you want your daughter bloody on the internet? That would hurt you,” Salinas said.
Salinas is staying in touch with the victim’s family and hopes to visit her when she gets better.
The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the crash. Security footage from the bar shows the vehicles going in the opposite direction, then off view, they spin off the road. The passengers in both vehicles walked away.
The brothers of the driver in the white SUV told KSAT’s Patty Santos that they only live a few yards away from the crash scene.