DSU Women’s Wrestling Team saves woman’s life in a highway accident

The new DSU Women’s Wrestling Team recently took part in their own version of the biblical Good Samaritan story.

And they were on the righteous side of it

The Lady Hornet wrestlers were returning from their first-ever competition at the East Stroudsburg University Open in Pennsylvania. It was about 2 a.m. in the morning of Monday, Nov. 3 and most if not all of the 13 student-athletes as well as Head Coach Kenya “Chris” Sloan were sleep – all except Assistant Coach Brock Budesheim, who was driving the 15-passenger Ford van.

As the team was traveling southbound on I-95 in Delaware and approaching the Del. 1 exit, Coach Budesheim came upon a car sitting sideways and blocking two lanes of the four-lane highway.

While other cars sped by ignoring the disabled BMW car, Coach Budesheim pulled up to it and stopped.

“Coach Sloan had awakened, and I yelled back to Roger Pfister, our Athletic Trainer who is also a volunteer fire fighter,” Coach Budesheim said. “We got out to assess the situation.”

As they approached the car, other vehicles continued speeding by the scene without any inclination to stop and help.

As they approached car, the coaches and the trainer found a lone dazed woman seated in the driver’s seat with a mobile phone sitting in the palm of her hand. All of the car’s airbags had been deployed and the woman – who appeared to be in her mid-20 – appeared to be in shock. After they were able to get the woman to respond, they were able to open her driver’s side door and walk her to the team van.

As 911 was being called, Coach Budesheim and Mr. Pfister went back to disabled BMW and began waving their flashlight-lit mobile phone to divert the oncoming traffic away from them and over to the open two lanes.

“Before we stopped there were at least eight or nine cars that sped by the disabled car,” Coach Sloan said. “And while we were stopped there, there were at least 30 vehicles that flew by.”

“No one stopped,” Coach Budesheim said. “we had cars that got within 100 feet of us that had to suddenly swerve around us. Meanwhile we are trying to call emergency services to come and get that portion of the road blocked. It was pretty hectic.”

With pieces of the disabled car were all over the highway, cars and semi-trucks were running over broken car parts and inadvertently deflecting them at the coach and trainer as they tried to divert the traffic.

Fortunately, the ambulance and the Delaware State Police arrived within about five minutes.

“If someone had hit her car while she was in it, I don’t think she would have survived,” Coach Sloan said. The Head Coach added she was particularly proud of her women wrestlers, who cared for the woman and made her comfortable in their van until the ambulance arrived.

“Sumayyah Kemp, our Team Captain, and I sat with the woman and talked to her and tried to keep her warm and comfortable,” Coach Sloan said. “We found out that she was driving home to Delaware from an airport in New York City and fell asleep at the wheel.”

Coach Budesheim said he believed that when she fell asleep, she hit the median causing the car to spin around eventually to a stop in the highway. “The front of the car and the back window were smashed,” the Assistant Coach said.

Both coaches expressed their belief that Providence was responsible of putting the team at that accident site at the right time to help the woman.

“We think the whole way the day played out led us to that moment,” Coach Budesheim said. “We were wrestling for 15 hours that day, and the tournament shouldn’t have been that long. We were unsuccessful in trying to get food ordered and delivered to us at the event to feed our student athletes. So, we had to stop at a Wawa on the way home so that our wrestlers could get something to eat.”

He said if the food had been delivered to them at the ESU, they would have arrived in Delaware earlier and would have passed by the site before the accident happened there.

Coach Sloan gives a lot of credit to her Assistant Coach. “We were all asleep, and Brock could have gone past the disabled car like all the other traffic did, and we would have never known,” the Head Coach said.

It was an eventful (and possibly lifesaving) end of the day that had also been an promising start for the first-year DSU Women’s Wrestling Team.

In the team’s first-ever competition, two Lady Hornet wrestlers – Icart Galumette and Louise Juitt – won 3rd place medals, each by excelling past most of the 32 wrestlers in their competition bracket to reach the semi-final round.