Update – 11:59 a.m. – The woman who ran into a downtown Bethesda business about noon Wednesday described the scene: A man had collapsed in the middle of Wisconsin Avenue and no drivers or pedestrians were stopping to help him.
Tatiana Tchamouroff, owner of Ninotch, an Urban Retreat, said the woman was hyperventilating while explaining that cars were swerving around the man, even using their turn signals to do so, but not stopping to help.
Moments later, as Tchamouroff ran out of her business with a glass of water to offer whatever help she could, she saw two men pulling the collapsed man from the road. She watched as one of the men called 911 on his cell phone, propped the injured man against a business near the corner of Wisconsin and Maple avenues and waited for paramedics to arrive. She also saw the other good Samaritan walk away as paramedics arrived.
Tchamouroff would later discover the identity of one of the good Samaritans, when the man who called paramedics walked by her business later that day.
“I ran out of my business when I saw him. I stopped him and said, ‘Are you the gentleman who pulled that guy out of the road?,’ ” Tchamouroff explained. “I said, ‘God bless you’ and then he said, ‘I’m from the South, it’s just what people do.’ I gave him the biggest hug and said ‘I pray to God if anything happens to me, I hope you’re there.’ ”
When she asked for his name, he was hesitant at first, but then said he was Larry Hall, the evening manager at the Tastee Diner on Wisconsin Avenue.
Hall said Thursday morning, when reached by phone while gardening at his Bethesda home, that he first noticed the man who collapsed in the street as he was walking along Wisconsin Avenue on his way to get a haircut.
“I saw the guy bobbing and weaving and then he just fell in the middle of the road,” Hall, 59, said. As he approached the man, he watched cars and pedestrians travel right by him. With the assistance of another man, Hall said, he was able to pull the collapsed man out of the road.
“I didn’t think anything of it, it was the neighborly thing to do,” Hall said. “I saw a man in trouble.”
His colleagues at the Tastee Diner also weren’t surprised to hear about what Hall had done.
“He’s a great guy, a great man,” grill cook Allen Snowden said.
Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Services' spokesman Pete Piringer said in an email that paramedics treated the approximately 50-year-old man for a non-serious injury he suffered during the fall and that he was transported to a hospital in good condition.
