An observant UPS driver from North Carolina is being credited with saving an elderly customer’s life last week after a “gut feeling” compelled him to enter the man’s house.
During his 25 years as a UPS driver, Navy veteran Todd Holland has gotten to know the residents who live on his Ashe County route. According to Yahoo, one of Holland’s friendliest customers is a man in his eighties who routinely waits on his back porch and greets him when he makes a delivery. But when Holland, 55, dropped off a package earlier this month, he noticed the man wasn’t outside at his usual spot.
“I knocked on his door and called his name,” Holland told Yahoo of trying to get in touch with the man, who lives alone. “But I figured he wasn’t home.”
Holland, a father of three, continued on his route, and wouldn’t return to the man’s house again until the following Tuesday. That’s when he noticed the package he dropped off four days earlier was still on the porch, untouched. Following his instincts that something was astray, Holland opened the man’s door and went inside.
“I started beating on the door, hollering his name, calling the house again,” Holland told WXII12. “I tried the door and it was unlocked, so I opened the door and stuck my head in. That’s when I saw him, laying in the floor.”
After seeing that the elderly man was unable to move, Holland dialed emergency services and held his hand as they waited for the ambulance to arrive.
“While we waited for the ambulance, he squeezed my hand and said, ‘I love you,’ ” he recalled to Yahoo.
Once help arrived, the man told paramedics that he had been on the ground was seven days, with no one to help him get back on his feet after falling. The paramedics said the man likely wouldn’t have survived another day, Holland said.
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“I just wish I could have found him Friday,” Holland told WXII12. “A close friend of mine said it was just not in God’s will to find him Friday, that God has got a plan for everything and it was his plan for me to find him yesterday.”
The man was listed in “fair condition” at the hospital following his rescue, according to the news station. Holland now hopes his story inspires other delivery drivers to act on their intuition if they feel a customer may be in danger.
“I made it a point to tell the guys at work this morning, if you deliver to people — and a lot of people that we deliver to, especially in these rural areas, us, the FedEx man and the mail man might be the only people they see during the week,” he explained. “I told them, if you realize and get a gut feeling that something is wrong, check it out. It probably is.”
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