When the referee called the game, there was more excitement than anyone could have imagined. He had a heart attack and collapsed.
It was a great helper!
When John Sculli, 61, suddenly fell to the ground after a game at the gym upstate New York was well underway, the entire scene changed.
There was an eerie silence before one of the players, 25-year-old Myles Copeland, jumped into action. He ran to the stricken man’s side and furiously started performing chest compressions.
Copeland, a semi-pro basketball player is also a firefighter for the Toledo Fire Department in Ohio.
“I run toward emergencies. I don’t run away from them,”Copeland spoke.
Copeland was acutely aware of the dire situation from the beginning.
“I just don’t happen to feel a pulse. He’s not breathing,”Copeland spoke.
Donna Metz, Donna’s fiancée, was in the stands.
“I mean, he was gone. So my only hope was that they could bring him back,” Metz said.
For 30 minutes, Copeland worked to get Sculli’s heart going again.
“It was an eternity. Watching your loved one’s chest get pumped like that, it’s terrorizing,” Metz said.
Metz stated that the experience was so frightening she had to leave.
“They finally came outside and said, ‘He’s back. He’s talking. He’s alert,’” Metz said.
Copeland claims that Sculli told him that he had come to referee the remainder of the game.
“A young man, who’s never traveled with the team, wasn’t scheduled to be here, stepped in and saved that man’s life,”A man explained to the crowd what had happened after the incident.
Sculli went in for triple bypass surgery on Friday, but before he did, he shared a message for Copeland with Inside Edition.
“Myles, my heart literally goes out to you for saving my life. You are my hero,”Sculli stated.
According to his family, the ref passed the surgery without any problems.
