Standing Taller Than His Challenges

It was just past noon on a sunny Saturday last August when longtime fishing buddies Jacob Bell and Craig McDonald decided to call it a day. Since 6:30 that morning, they’d been fishing from Bell’s ­18-foot aluminium runabout on Texas’s Lake Waxahachie, about a half hour south of Dallas. Trolling for bass and lazily drifting from Bell’s vintage boat, they’d landed a half dozen keepers.

“Not a bad day’s work,” Bell told McDonald as he steered the runabout to the boat ramp where Bell’s truck and boat trailer were parked. As he dropped off McDonald, Bell heard screaming coming from the lake, some 150 feet offshore.

He sped in his boat toward the scene, where he saw a girl, had to be around 13, hollering and waving an arm. She was in 12-foot-deep water and seemed to be holding on to a life jacket or a raft. But when Bell got closer, he was shocked to see that the girl was, in fact, gripping the foot of another girl, who was submerged upside down.

My God! thought Bell. She’s drowning! Instinctively, he grabbed the submerged girl’s arms, and then her hands, trying to pull her up and into his boat. Though the six-foot-tall Bell, 48, was lean and muscular, he couldn’t lift her. She was like a dead weight. Instead, he pulled her through the water to the rear of the boat, which was more shallow. There, he was able to hoist her up and on to the deck as her panicked friend grabbed on to the side of the boat.

As he looked at the unconscious teenager lying on the deck of his boat, he thought, She’s gone! Her face, her lips, even her ears were a ghostly blue. But Bell’s recent CPR training kicked in. (Just six months earlier, he had taken a first-aid course as required for his job as a truck driver.) He began feverishly pumping on her chest, just as he’d been taught. After a few compressions, she spit out spurts of water from her mouth. He kept up the compressions. But then her eyes rolled back.

No! thought Bell. Don’t let me lose you!

More compressions. The girl spit out more gobs of water. Bell kept compressing her chest until she took a deep, raspy breath and opened her eyes. She’s back! he thought, watching her face transform from blue to purple to pale to a dark beige. She was alive. He sat her up against the side of the boat. Once they reached the shore, a paramedic, who had been called by onlookers, clambered into the boat and continued helping 15-year-old Genesis Delgado before rushing her to the hospital. She was released later that day.

It didn’t take long for the media to brand Bell a hero. People magazine, USA Today, CBS News, Fox News and others reached out and featured his rescue. He was uncomfortable with the praise, telling his wife, “I’m not a hero. I just did what I needed to do.”

“You are a hero,” she corrected him. “You saved someone’s life.”

The idea of being labelled a hero still felt awkward to Bell, and he was happy to get back to work driving for an energy provider.

Six weeks after rescuing Delgado, as he was driving west of Fort Worth, he got a call from his manager, who had been monitoring his progress via the company’s GPS system.“You’re going the wrong way, Jake,” he said. “You need to head to Cisco.”

“Darn, you’re right,” said Bell, as he turned his big rig on to the first county road west. Within minutes, he noticed power lines along the roadside buckling, and he soon spotted a plume of smoke. He slowed down to see a car that had apparently hit a telephone pole, careened off the road, slid down a hill and flipped over. It was on fire.

He grabbed a fire extinguisher from inside his truck and hurried down to the burning car. He sprayed until the extinguisher was empty, but the car kept burning. So he used the metal extinguisher to smash the driver’s side window. Bell had to work fast; the bottom of the car, which was now on top, was burning, and the tree branches above it were in flames.

An inflated airbag blocked his vision, but he reached into the car and felt an arm. The driver was still buckled in by his seat belt, hanging upside down in the overturned car. Bell reached for his pocketknife, breathing deeply to fill his lungs with fresh air, and cut the seat belt. The unconscious driver, an elderly man, began slipping down. Bell cradled him tightly and pulled him from the burning car.

Laying the man gently on the ground, Bell checked his neck for a pulse. It was slight, so he began performing chest compressions. Again, his recent first-aid training kicked in. Smoke from the burning car billowed all around. Worried the car might explode, Bell carried the man up the hill to the roadside and continued reviving him. Paramedics soon arrived and rushed the man to the hospital.

The driver, an engineer from Houston, survived, suffering only smoke inhalation and some fractured ribs. Bell, too, was admitted to a nearby hospital for smoke inhalation but was released a day later.

For the second time in two months, Jacob Bell had been in the right place at the right time to save someone’s life. This time, when the press flocked to Bell and dubbed him “a two-time hero,” he didn’t object. Indeed, he wanted the world know that there was another side to his story, one he was now ready to share.

As he explains from his cozy home in Red Oak, Texas, with his wife, Jessica Bell, and their six-year-old daughter, Julianna, nearby, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I’ve done drugs, stolen, and more. I’ve been in prison for repeated burglary convictions. But I never gave up on myself. I was down but not out.”

He pauses, blinks back a tear and adds, “and after I saved these people, I began to feel proud of myself for the first time in my life. Maybe this was God’s way of showing that anyone, no matter how far they have fallen, can find a meaning in their life if they work hard, if they continue believing in themselves.”

Jessica hands him a tissue. As he wipes tears from his eyes, he adds, “You know, someone said I saved more than two people’s lives last year. I get it. I also saved myself.”

To more such stories of real-life, everyday heroes, click here.