"Right place at the right time!" Boston mayor helps driver whose car caught fire
After Boston Mayor Marty Walsh hosted Patriots Nation on Tuesday for the team's Super Bowl LIII victory over the Los Angeles Rams, he helped a stranger on the side of the road, CBS Boston reports.
After the Super Bowl parade, Walsh saw sparks coming out of a passing motorist's wheel, he told The Boston Globe.
"So I said to Joe, 'We might want to pull them over,' " Walsh told the Globe, referring to Boston police Officer Joe Holmes, who serves on his security detail. "So he turned the lights on, and they went into the breakdown lane. And what happened was, there was some type of fire in the engine."
Walsh said they then called the Fire Department, and then State Police showed up, and they "hit it with an extinguisher."
The driver, Jim Geraghty of Quincy, Massachusetts, told CBS Boston his car "shot a fireball out of the side and I was like 'what's going on?'"
But Geraghty hadn't realized the severity of the situation beneath the hood. Walsh "'said 'your car is on fire, your car is on fire. Get everything you need,' and I pulled everything out randomly," said Geraghty.
When he exited his car he saw the second Good Samaritan, none other than the Mayor himself. "Then on the side of the road I see a guy standing next to me and it's Marty Walsh. I'm like 'Marty' and I shook his hand he said 'get your stuff, get your stuff.'"
Walsh said it's the kind of thing he's only seen in news stories but something anyone should do. "You got to do it, anybody who sees that situation," he said. "Even if you're not a police officer and see that situation you have to try to get the person to pull over somehow, especially with smoke and sparks coming from under the engine."
It was Walsh's police driver who grabbed a fire extinguisher before first responders arrived, and Geraghty sat in the mayor's vehicle to wait, and they had a few things to talk about. "We talked about the parade, Marty said it went off great, it was a great day for Boston and he was pleased with the turnout," he said.
It was also great timing for Jim Geraghty who tweeted out his thanks to the Mayor who was taking the credit. "You take care of somebody when you see a situation like that," he said.
Geraghty says he'll be in the market for a new car, and was very impressed and grateful for the response. "They were more worried about me the citizen than anything else," he said.
Walsh said he was in the "right place at the right time" and thanked firefighters for their quick response. The Fire Department thanked him for his help in a tweet.
