Jayme Erickson responded on November 15 to a distress call for a car accident: a truck lost control on a highway north of the Canadian city of Calgary and hit a vehicle in which a teenager was traveling.
This paramedic was the first to arrive and, knowing that the young woman was at serious risk of death, she sat next to her and nursed and encouraged her until she was removed from the wreckage of the car and airlifted to a hospital.
The driver was able to get her foot out of the car, but the crash left the teenager disfigured beyond recognition, and with extremely serious injuries that caused her death shortly after being admitted to the hospital.
Erickson is comforted by her husband, Sean Erickson, as she speaks to the press in Airdrie, Alberta, on November 22, 2022. Jeff McIntosh / AP
“When he was coming back [from the scene of the accident], he expressed his pain and frustration to his partner, knowing that a family would probably lose a daughter, a sister or a granddaughter,” said another paramedic and friend of Erickson, Richard Reed, who was with her.
“Shortly after I got home, there was a knock on the door.
It was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police," Reed said.
“Upon entering, to his horror, he discovered that the girl with whom he had sat in the back of the wrecked vehicle, keeping her alive so her family could say goodbye, and who was unrecognizable from her injuries, was his own daughter. ”.
"Unbeknownst to Jayme, she was keeping his own daughter alive," Reed concluded in his account to reporters days later.
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Erickson decided to talk about what happened Tuesday to send a message in honor of his 17-year-old daughter, Montana, remembering how "beautiful" she was and how she "fought bravely to the end."
She was an avid swimmer and planned to become a lawyer, she explained.
“She was so beautiful,” he added, “she was a fighter and
she fought until the day she died
.”