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Overcast Long Beach firefighter helps man hit by truck in Lynbrook
Off-duty paramedic rushed to scene on ‘instinct’
As Dave Yolinsky headed home to Long Beach at around 2 p.m. on Monday, he saw what looked like a large crushed box wedged underneath a tractor-trailer stopped at the intersection of Sunrise Highway and Ocean Avenue in Lynbrook.
Yolinsky, a paramedic and a member of the Long Beach Fire Department's professional unit for three years, had just worked a 24-hour shift and was running some errands on his day off. As a number of cars pulled away, he realized that he had come upon the scene of an accident.
“I saw there was a semi tractor-trailer that looked like it was making a right turn but was stopped,” said Yolinsky, 27. “It looked like there was a box underneath, like something fell off the truck. I didn’t think it was a person. But what I initially thought was a box … was a guy in an electronic wheelchair.”
Yolinsky said he later learned that the victim, a 58-year-old Hispanic man who was headed south on the west side of Ocean Avenue, had been crossing Sunrise Highway when, according to Nassau County police, the truck made a right turn from Ocean Avenue’s southbound lane onto Sunrise and hit the man.
Though police were already on the scene, emergency medical units had yet to arrive, Yolinsky said. “There was no ambulance or anything like that,” he said. “I told them who I was. Your instinct and training takes over — you don’t think about what’s going on. You see and you react.”
Police urged him to help the man, who was underneath the rear section of the truck. Yolinsky saw that the wheelchair was split in two, that the man had sustained head injuries and that the truck had severed most of his lower left leg. “I would describe it as 90 percent amputation of his lower left leg,” he said, adding that he began applying a tourniquet as other EMTs from the Lynbrook Fire Department arrived at the scene and police halted traffic on Sunrise Highway.
“Paramedics showed up with more equipment, and we removed him from the wheelchair,” he said. “We started an IV on him and we had a helicopter land on Sunrise Highway.”
