Tacoma mom tries to find Good Samaritans who saved her life at Seahawks 12k run
Apr 16, 2014, 3:54 PM | Updated: 5:20 pm
Sarah Clerget rests in her hospital bed at Valley Medical Center in Renton Wednesday. (Photo courtesy Ryan Pricco)
(Photo courtesy Ryan Pricco)
A 35-year-old Tacoma mother and her husband are counting their blessings today after some Good Samaritans stepped in to help save her life. And now they want to find them to express their thanks.
Sara Clerget tells KIRO Radio she had just finished the Seahawks 12K at the Virginia Mason Athletic Center in Renton Sunday when she suddenly started feeling dizzy.
“And I knew that I needed to sit down and put my head between my legs, so I went over to a little barricade and I held on and sat down,” she says.
A woman who saw Sarah sit down came over to check on her.
“And immediately I kind of slumped over and she started screaming ‘help, help, help,” Sara recounts from her hospital bed at Valley Medical Center. The seemingly perfectly healthy woman had gone into cardiac arrest. Sarah says another person nearby jumped into action.
“It was a man with a white Seahawks jersey. He immediately started performing CPR on me,” she says.
Sara’s heart had stopped for two minutes. Medics arrived not long after and shocked her back to life.
Sarah says she’s incredibly grateful for the strangers who sprung to action and saved her life.
“They saw an emergency and they stepped right up, no one hesitated,” she says.
Sara’s husband, Ryan, was at home with their 4-year-old and one-year-old at the time. He was shocked when he rushed to see her at the hospital.
“She was in the emergency room and the first time I saw her was the first time I broke down crying, probably. You know, just seeing her connected to all those tubes and really letting it sink in about what just happened, it kind of hit home at that moment,” he says.
Sara continues recovering at Valley Medical Center as doctors try to figure out what happened. They suspect an electrical signal must have misfired.
Ryan says he couldn’t be more thankful, and he and his wife hope to find the people who helped to express their gratitude.
Friends and family have been posting her story on Facebook in hopes of finding the Good Samaritans. They think they’ve tracked down one of them – believed to be a Kittitas County sheriff’s deputy.
“More than anything, just thinking of those two (their children) growing up without having very little memory of their mother would have been unbearable for me and our family. So I need to thank those people.”
KIRO Radio’s Ursula Reutin and Jillian Raftery contributed to this report
