A bizarre incident left Jeff Lieberman dazed and injured on a Vancouver street when three people helped save his life, and he's searching for them now to properly thank them.
Last Sunday, Sept. 5, Lieberman was cycling back from having lunch with his niece near Main Street and 20th Avenue to his parents' place near Jericho Beach. Around 5:20 p.m. he was going down 8th Avenue when he decided to head to the more bike-friendly 7th Avenue.
"At Laurel I took a right and that's a fairly steep block," he explains to Vancouver is Awesome. "As I turned the corner, my memory is a little foggy in this area, but it seems like the brake cable on the front brakes snapped."
In what he calls a bizarre and unusual accident, it seems his brake cable snapped and got wrapped up in the front wheel when he tried to slow down for the corner. When the wheel jammed he thinks he went over the handlebars. He's not sure of exactly what happened, since his memories of the crash and what happened just after still haven't returned.
There's a good reason for that; along with a broken nose and broken finger he received a mild concussion.
"I don't have any memory of the actual incident," Lieberman says. "I just have no clue as to how I reacted in the situation."
The first memories after the accident are still foggy.
"The next thing I remember is again unclear, but someone was waking me and maybe I was lying in the street, or maybe I had crawled over to the side of the street," he says. "Two women and a man had stopped and were helping me."
He does remember them saying they'd already called 911 and then helped him call his sister, who's an ER nurse. They also got paper towels from somewhere nearby and got him better situated.
"I was pretty dazed, I didn't know quite where I was, how I got there, what I was doing, what year it was," he says.
While he grew up in Vancouver, Lieberman now lives in New York where he works as a filmmaker (and bikes regularly). He was in Vancouver to visit his family, staying with his parents over the summer and borrowing a bike that'd been with the family for 20 years.
At first, as he sat on the side of Laurel Street, he wasn't even sure why or how long he'd been in Vancouver.
His sister arrived before an ambulance and met the trio, but was worried about her brother, where the ambulance was and where the bike was; she missed getting their names.
The ambulance arrived and took Lieberman to Vancouver General, where it was confirmed he had a mild concussion. Luckily a CT scan showed no internal bleeding.
"I was very lucky in that sense; I was wearing a helmet. I think the helmet saved my life, to be honest," he says. "I don't think I was doing anything remarkably dangerous; I wasn't speeding, I hadn't been drinking.
"It just shows even in the most mild biking a helmet can really be a lifesaver."
Who were the good Samaritans?
After spending the night in the hospital Lieberman decided he wanted to find the trio and thank them.
"I just want to thank them from the bottom of my heart; I do feel that they saved my life," he says. "I'm pretty grateful for that. It's hard to compute that power that a stranger may have had over your life but it's something very powerful.
"I think I'd have done the same thing, but there's clearly a possibility people wouldn't have done that."
He notes that if a car had come down the hill while he was in the street it could have gone differently for him, or he might have lain in the street for much longer, or any of a variety of scenarios could have turned out much worse.
"100 things could have happened that were worse," he says. "I feel terribly sad, even a bit guilty, that I didn't get a chance to thank them."
He doesn't know too many details about the three people. He's certain there were two women and a man, with one woman taking the lead on helping him and the other two providing assistance.
"The woman who was closest to me, who was helping me the most, I want to say she had light brown hair," he says. "Maybe longish hair."
He's fairly sure they were all Caucasian and in their 30s, but notes that those details could both be wrong. He believes the man was a firefighter, as well.
They likely lived nearby, he adds, since they were able to get paper towel quickly, though it could have been in their car.
They were nearby when it happened, he adds, and he wasn't in the street long. He has a receipt from the nearby London Drugs from 5:15 p.m. and sent a text from his phone to a friend at 5:18 p.m. Then he called his sister at 5:30 p.m., his phone shows. In those 12 minutes Liberman continued cycling, he had his crash, he was rescued off the street by the trio, the ambulance was called and he was revived.
"I was in and out of consciousness that whole period," he notes. "I didn't fully feel awake until I got to the hospital."
If the trio can reach out, he'd like to personally thank them. He can be reached via email, [email protected]
"I just want to make sure that they realize that their generosity was acknowledged and not forsaken," he says.
