While driving with his wife, Sara, down Interstate 35 near Osceola, Iowa, on Saturday, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) had just passed a semi pulled over on the shoulder when, seconds later, the explosive crash of metal on metal jolted the Wisconsin congressman’s attention.
There, in his review mirror, he saw what no one wants to see happen at a high rate of speed.
“I’m watching a Dodge Grand minivan disintegrate. It seemed to drift off the road at about 70 miles per hour, more so on the passenger side of the car. My wife, Sarah, was like, what happened? I looked at it, I said, someone just died,” he said gravely.
Van Orden, a retired United States Navy SEAL representing Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, turned his truck into the grass divider and returned to the scene.
“I ran to the passenger side, where all the damage was, and there was this 11-year-old kid, and I looked at him, and his calf, which is about as big as my thigh, was completely ripped apart, so I could see his tibia and his fibula, just a big chunk of him bleeding. And he had an arterial bleed in his right wrist,” he said.
Van Orden rushed back to his car, opened his suitcase, pulled out two pairs of socks, and fashioned them into makeshift tourniquets for his arm and leg.
“By then, probably 10 people had also pulled over to help, I’m like, does somebody have a knife? And they’re like, yep. So I cut the seat belts off and then made tourniquets,” he explained.
“Some big old Iowa farm dude, probably 60-something, rips off a windshield wiper for his arm, then another lady there said she was a medic. She wound up grabbing a piece of metal and made a tourniquet on his leg, and then all of us packed him up and got him up into the ambulance,” he said of the quick actions of everyone who pulled up on the side of the road ahead of the police and paramedics.
“It took about 10 to 15 minutes. He would’ve bled to death,” he said of the challenge of the first responders getting on site on the interstate that was in the middle of miles and miles of farm land.
“He would’ve been gone,” Van Orden said, reflecting on how it was only the quick response of so many bystanders, including himself, that saved the man’s life.
Orden visited the young man on Monday at the hospital in Des Moines, a reunion filled with emotion and gratitude.
“What happened out there is everything that I love about America. So we’re in the middle of somewhere, and this happens, and people just start showing up. They start asking, ‘Hey, can we do this? Can we do that?” he explained.
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As he is trying to get the tourniquet secured on the child’s leg so he stops bleeding to death, Van Orden says he can hear people standing behind him saying, “We need to start doing traffic control,” and he turns around, and there are these dudes who started blocking off the traffic in both lanes.
“It’s amazing,” he said of people stepping up to keep everyone safe.
