Stacked in a pile of his routine incident reports on December 14th was a report by Summerville Police Department’s Doug Wright, a police captain, detailing the moments when he and and an anonymous passerby saved the life Bobby Douglas who was trapped in a burning car.
It began as an early morning drive as Wright, who was not on duty at the time, was headed toward Charleston, SC around six in the morning. The police captain saw the vehicle of Bobby Douglas crashed off the road. Douglas had swerved to try and avoid hitting a deer when he lost control and was trapped inside his car.
When Wright arrived at the scene there were no signs of a fire and he looked around to see if anyone had been thrown from the vehicle. He called in the incident and then went to the car to stay with Bobby until reinforcements were able to arrive and take him to the hospital.
As Wright waited flames began to appear under the hood of the vehicle and the police captain instinctually grabbed his fire extinguisher to put out the flames. Unfortunately it was not enough and the fire began to grow.
Knowing he had to break protocol and move Douglas, something that officers are trained not to do to prevent making potential injuries worse, Captain Wright attempted to move the driver. With his passenger door destroyed and the driver side door trapped against the shoulder of the road, however, he couldn’t do it alone.
Wright got the only help he could—he ran to the middle of the road and flagged down anyone that would stop. It happened to be a driver in a white pickup truck. Wright had the pickup truck driver tried to extinguish the flames with the fire extinguisher while the police officer attempted to get Douglas out of the car but it was no use.
As flames continued to grow, Wright and the pickup driver managed to get to Douglas, who was seriously injured and bleeding, and pull him out of the vehicle just a few short minutes before the car fully erupted in flames.
Once Bobby Douglas was safe the anonymous passerby had already made his way back to his white pickup and went on his way before Wright even had a chance to get a name.