A postal worker in Chicago is drawing national attention for helping save a man.
Jaylen Lockhart was working his normal postal route in one Chicago-area neighborhood on Nov. 16 when he saw an elderly man walking his dog on the sidewalk fall down on the pavement.
“He seemed to be walking off-balance … he fell and hit his head…he faceplanted on the ground,” 26-year-old Lockhart told The Washington Post.
Lockhart immediately got out of his truck, checked on the man, called 911, and waved down some drivers for help.
“I dropped his treat bag on the ground, and I bent over to pick it up,” 75-year-old Guy Miller said. “About the same time I bent over, he lunged at a squirrel. I lost my balance and hit the ground.”
Lockhart said that Miller was bleeding from a wound on his head, and he used napkins and someone’s spare T-shirt to plug the injury.
“I’m trying to get up at the same time and, and … he tell me just to stay down, just stay down, you might be hurt, and it can’t be walking anywhere,” Miller said.
Lockhart asked Miller where he lived and rushed to his home, which was about a block away, where he told Miller’s wife about the fall.
After Lockhart notified the family, he went back to work. Miller was brought home by his wife, and his daughter, who’s a nurse, dropped by to examine the minor wounds and bruises he suffered.
“He’s diabetic, so he bleeds easily. It looked much worse than once we got it cleaned off,” Miller’s wife said.
Lockhart didn’t give the family his name when he visited their home, so Miller’s daughter posted a snapshot of him from Ring camera footage and asked social media to help her reconnect with him to offer proper thanks.
The following morning, Lockhart woke up to hundreds of notifications on his phone and got in touch with Miller’s daughter.
The selfless act earned Lockhart recognition from the Aurora city government and an invite to the Miller family’s Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas festivities.
Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin presented Lockhart with the Mayor’s Award for Service at the city’s annual Winter Lights Fest.
“You make us all Aurora proud,” Irvin said.
The story, first reported by NBC Chicago, has made waves across the internet.
“It’s really been a blessing,” Lockhart said. “I never expected any of this.”
In a similar story of strangers spending the holidays together, 26-year-old Jamal Hinton and 67-year-old Wanda Dench are known widely online for celebrating eight Thanksgivings with each other after Dench accidentally texted Hinton instead of her grandson in 2016.
