11-year-old takes wheel after mom has seizure
?Three years ago, when she was in second grade, Sage Encapera of Perryopolis said a paramedic came to her school and taught her class how to check a person’s pulse, telling them a normal pulse follows the beat of the song “Happy Birthday.”
The lesson stuck with her, but she never put it to use until Friday.
After her mother passed out while driving, the 11-year-old grabbed the wheel with one hand and checked her mother’s pulse with the other, all the while steering the car in the bustling Friday afternoon traffic on Route 51.
“At first, I thought she was dead. I checked her pulse and kept calm about it,” Sage Encapera said.
On their way to Uniontown from their home in Perryopolis to do some shopping, Dana Encapera, 36, said they had just driven past Pizon’s Place on Route 51 and she told Sage that they would stop at McDonald’s to get something to eat.
That was the last thing she said she remembered until she regained consciousness in an ambulance on the way to Uniontown Hospital.
Sage Encapera said her mother was driving in the left lane and was about to pass another car when she passed out. She said she didn’t want the car to drift into the oncoming lanes so she grabbed the wheel and steered into the right lane.
Actually, Sage Encapera said her mother must have been partially conscious because she stepped on the gas pedal and brake pedal at different times during the ordeal.
The braking caused the seat belt to tighten down on the girl, making it difficult for her to reach the steering wheel.
Unable to reach the brake pedal, she guided the car off the road to bring it to a stop.
The front end and right fender of the car were damaged when Sage steered the car onto a steep embankment near the Smock Road intersection. The car struck four road signs before it came to a stop.
Her mother, Dana, father, Anthony, and the firefighters, paramedics, police and the witnesses, who were at the scene after Sage steered the car off the road nearly three miles from where her mother lost consciousness, called her a hero.
“My daughter definitely was a hero,” Dana Encapera said.
Dana Enapera has a sore back.
“It could have been way worse,” she said. The ambulance crew and a state police trooper told her that her daughter had saved her life.
“In my mind, she deserves some kind of award,” said Sage’s father Anthony Encapera. “She actually steered the car all the way down to the Smock intersection. My wife was totally unconscious. She was slouched over.”
Her father said she called Fayette County 911 on a cellphone and told a dispatcher what happened and where they were, and then she called him.
Sage Enapera said several strangers stopped to help before firefighters, paramedics and police arrived.
He said he immediately began driving to the scene. He said he stayed on the phone with Sage and was able to hear strangers telling his wife not to try to move until an ambulance arrived.
When he arrived, he said the people who stopped to help told him he wouldn’t believe what his daughter had done.
He said a state trooper told Sage Enapera she should be proud of herself after he talked to the witnesses.
“I’m so proud of her,” Anthony Enapera said.