ABOVE: See the report from WIVB News in Buffalo – including the dramatic cellphone video of the man rushing to save his neighbour’s life
If there was an award for “Neighbour of the Year”, it would likely have to go to Buffalo, New York’s Gary Heard by acclimation.
Known as “The Mayor of Bush Street”, Heard is a fixture of Buffalo’s Black Rock neighbourhood. He’s known for his acts of kindness around the community, such as blowing snow off his neighbour’s driveways every time there’s a snowstorm.
But Gary is known for far more than just his snow blowing. He’s helped save the lives of a few of his neighbours – one of them on more than one occasion.
According to local Buffalo news reports, Gary was out blowing snow on his street when he spotted something in the snow down the street.
“All I see is something in the middle of the street,” Heard told WIVB 4 News in Buffalo. “And it turned out to be a person.”
The person turned out to be his neighbour, 55-year-old Frank Sloan, who has collapsed due to a heart attack while walking to buy cigarettes for his wife.
Cell phone video shot by Heard’s son showed the dramatic moments that Heard and other bystanders gathered around Sloan, fighting to keep him alive as an ambulance was called.
“What’s my name buddy? Stay up! Stay up!” Heard is heard saying to Sloan in the video. “Keep talking to me.”
“My Heart! It hurts! It hurts! It hurts!”
“I know it hurts. Wake up buddy! Wake up!” Heard implored Sloan as he covered him in blankets.
First-responders eventually arrived, but the street was too blanketed with snow for the ambulance to make it to Sloan’s location.
So Heard and the other bystanders picked up Sloan and loaded him into the back of Heard’s pickup truck.
“He picked him up off the middle of the street, put him in the back of his truck, and brought him up the street because the ambulance and the fire truck could not get down this street,” Paul Block, who witnessed the rescue, told WIBS news.
It’s an incredible act of heroism and kindness. But here’s the kicker: according to Sloan, this was the third time Heard had saved him while he was having a heart attack.
“I’ll do anything for Gary,” he said. “He knows that.”
“Except die for me,” Heard joked right back.
But it doesn’t stop there: another neighbour of Heard’s says he saved her daughter’s life during a snowstorm last winter.
Kenetria Allen, who lives two doors down from Gary, says she ran to Gary’s house when her daughter began choking on a sucker which had become lodged in her throat.
“I just ran to his house, and I was banging on his door with my daughter in my hands,” she told reporters. “And he grabbed her from out of my hands, he and his wife, and somehow got that sucker lodged out of her throat and they saved my daughter’s life.”
Yet when asked about the incident, Heard denied being a hero.
“No, I just said a prayer and I got it up out of her.”
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