It was a typical night on a busy San Diego highway — until it wasn’t. In a sudden flash of tragedy, chaos unfolded. A motorcycle had collided violently, leaving two people lying motionless in the middle of the road. Cars screeched by, horns blaring, headlights cutting through the dark as panicked drivers tried to avoid the wreckage. Among the injured was Melinda Gurrola, gravely wounded and bleeding heavily. The crash had severed her leg, and her life was slipping away with every passing second.
In the middle of that nightmare, someone ran toward the danger — not away from it. Sammuel Goodwin, a hospital corpsman with the 1st Marine Regiment, happened to be nearby when he witnessed the horrifying crash. Trained to save lives in combat zones, Goodwin didn’t think twice. He grabbed his medical bag and two tourniquets and sprinted directly into the speeding traffic — weaving through four lanes of vehicles to get to the victims as quickly as possible.
A Marine’s Training Put to the Ultimate Test
By the time Goodwin reached Melinda, her situation was critical. She was rapidly losing blood, and a makeshift belt someone had tied around her leg wasn’t enough to stop the arterial bleeding. She was slipping into unconsciousness.
“The belt wasn’t stopping the arterial bleed,” Goodwin later said. “There wasn’t time to wait.”
Drawing on his advanced medical training, he applied a combat tourniquet to stem the bleeding. But the injuries were extensive. He packed a second wound with gauze and carefully wrapped what remained of her severed leg to prevent further blood loss — and to preserve any chance that surgeons could later reattach it. All of this he did while kneeling on the asphalt, surrounded by broken glass, debris, and the constant danger of passing traffic.
