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(syracuse.com) – A U.S. marine from Marcellus, N.Y., pulled an unconscious man from a burning car near the marine’s base in San Diego.

Lance Cpl. Patrick Sammon, a 2012 graduate of Marcellus High School, had just left a store near Marine Corps Air Station Miramar the evening of Jan. 9 and was walking to his car when he heard tires squealing and then a crash. He turned and saw that two cars had collided about 200 yards away on a busy San Diego street.
Sammon, 22, said he ran to the scene and noticed the engine of one of the vehicles, a black sedan, on fire and the driver, a man in his 20s, unconscious behind the wheel. Most of the damage was to the front passenger side of the car, so Sammon was able to open the driver’s door and unbuckle the man’s seatbelt, he said.

“I picked him up bridal-style and carried him to the shoulder of the road and put him down on the grass,” Sammon said in an interview with syracuse.com. “He was still unconscious.”

Sammon then ran over to the other car. The two men and two women in that vehicle had already gotten themselves out of the vehicle. However, the driver was sitting beside the car with an obviously broken leg, Sammon said.

He said he picked the driver up and carried him over to the side of the road and put him down next to the still-unconscious driver of the other vehicle.

The fire department arrived a few minutes later and the unconscious driver woke up after about five minutes, he said.

“He didn’t even know he was in an accident,” he said.

Sammon, whose father Brian is employed by Onondaga County as a boiler operator, joined the Marines in 2013 following his graduation from Marcellus High, where he was a linebacker on the football team. He deployed to Kuwait for seven months after completing training. He is now stationed at Miramar, a Marine Corps air station north of downtown San Diego that is best known as the former location of the Navy Fighter Weapons School’s TOPGUN training program.

Sammon’s heroics drew media attention in San Diego. The next day, San Diego Tribune published a story about the rescue and a local television station, KFMB-TV, broadcast an interview with Sammon. A few days later, the Marine Corps Times published a story that started out, “When things go boom in the night, Marines are going to react.”

Sammon is playing down any hero talk, however.

“I think it’s more about being a good human being,” he said. “You see a guy who needs help, you help him.”