Report: Two Goodfellow AFB Officers Rescued Infant from Fatal South Bryant Crash

Two Goodfellow AFB officers were among the first to the scene of the Oct. 9 fatal crash of the Chevy S-10 and the semi-truck on South Bryant. According to Goodfellow Public Affairs, the officers were able to pull the mother’s baby out of the wreckage.

Airman 1st Class Devin Boyer reports that 2nd Lts. Emily M. Bohnenkamp and Andrew Lim, both 315th Training Squadron students, were to their way to workout when they spotted the tractor-trailer stretched across South Bryant early in the morning of Oct. 9. Next, they noticed that a Chevy S-10 pickup was crushed into the truck and stopped to investigate.

Lim approached the driver’s side of the S-10 and, having previous training as an EMT, confirmed that the mother who had been driving was already dead. She had no pulse. Lim then noticed that a baby was in a car seat on the passenger side, hidden behind a deployed airbag. He took a closer look.

"The baby wasn't really reacting or anything at first...but then when I was trying to work with the baby, [she] started crying," Lim told Goodfellow’s reporter. That’s when Lim noticed smoke pouring out of the cab of the pickup. He had to get the baby out before a fire broke out. "When I was trying to pull the baby out and I saw the smoke come into the cab, my life kind of flashed before my eyes," he told the Goodfellow reporter.

Although the best practice is to rescue a baby while keeping it inside the car seat, Lim said he couldn’t dislodge the seat from the pickup’s crushed cab. So he unstrapped the child from the car seat and brought the child to safety.

Goodfellow said that while Lim was assessing the situation, Bohnenkamp called 911 on her cell phone.

According to another witnesses at the scene, the truck driver attempted to help the occupants of the pickup immediately after the crash. Surveillance video at Housley Communications nearby caught the entire crash on video. That is how it was determined that the driver of the S-10 ran the red light and hit the semi-truck.

According to the San Angelo police, San Angelo Fire Department EMS transported the 8-month-old infant passenger, Taela Carter,  to Shannon Medical Center with undisclosed injuries. The driver of the S-10, Treva Hernandez, of San Angelo was pronounced dead at the scene. She was pronounced dead as of 4:58 a.m. that morning, police said.