An 80-year-old woman in Utah dialed a wrong number after injuring herself from a fall. Instead of calling her son when she finally managed to drag herself to the phone, she accidentally called a detective’s cellphone.
When the detective was about to hang up after telling Halene Johnson she reached the wrong number, he sensed something was wrong.
“She was asking for her son and I thought first thing, it’s just the wrong number. The more information I got the more I realized it was a serious thing,” West Valley police detective Dana Pugmire told NBC News.
“I stayed on the phone with her until the fire department got there. It was just luck or maybe it was meant to be,” he added.
Johnson told the news station that she was stuck on the floor for hours after she fell in the bedroom of her home. “My hips hurt, my back hurts, everything hurts.”
She eventually manged to get herself to the phone to call for help.
“I started realizing that maybe she was in trouble and she told me, ‘I had fallen down, I’m in my bedroom and I can’t get up,'” he told Fox News. “She was just saying, ‘I’m hurt.’ And I said, ‘OK, help’s on the way.’”
Pugmire arranged with dispatch to send the fire department and paramedics to her home in Taylorsville, Utah.
He stayed on the phone with her for 20 minutes, trying to calm her down, until they got there.
“I consider it a minor miracle that, that happened,” Johnson said.
Although this isn’t the first time Johnson has fallen, she said she didn’t suffer any major injuries. A couple of years ago she broke her back and says her knees are really bad, too.
“Det. Pugmire could have told the woman she’d reached the wrong number and ended it there, but he trusted his instinct and as a result, was able to go above and beyond helping someone who desperately needed it.,” West Valley police said in a statement on Facebook.
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