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FedEx Driver Survives 75-Foot Fall After 'Good Deed'

Jeremiah Cribb jumped over side of NC bridge to avoid getting hit by truck while helping motorists
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 24, 2020 9:35 AM CST
The Truck Hurtled Toward Him. Then: 'I Just Started Free-Falling'
Stock photo.   (Getty Images/Cha_DZ)

It was a middle-of-the-night "good deed" that FedEx driver Jeremiah Cribb was trying to do, per CNN—but it turned out to be one that landed him in the hospital after he plunged 75 feet over a North Carolina bridge. The Salisbury Post and WSOC report that Cribb, 24, was driving on Interstate 85 through Rowan County, toward Greensboro, around 2am Wednesday when he came across two motorists on the Yadkin River Bridge who'd struck a concrete divider. Cribb pulled over to clear debris from the accident off the road and divert traffic away from the disabled car, which was jutting out into the road. Suddenly, however, Cribb saw an 18-wheel tractor-trailer hurtling toward him. He tells the Post he leaped over the side of the bridge in the darkness, thinking there was grass at the same level on the other side. But there wasn't grass—only a 75-foot fall onto a hard sandbar below.

"I just started free-falling," he says. Once rescuers arrived on the scene, firefighter Jacob Vodochodsky rappelled over the bridge to get to Cribb, and when he saw how Cribb was positioned, motionless and in a fetal position, he worried about his condition. "I gave him a little pinch on the leg, because the way he was laying there, [it] looked like he may have been paralyzed," Vodochodsky tells WSOC. "He felt it." A tweet from the Salisbury Fire Department noted it took 45 minutes to rescue Cribb, who was conscious but with serious injuries—he had a collapsed lung and three broken ribs. Still, they don't appear to be life threatening, which Salisbury FD Battalion Chief Nick Martin calls "miraculous." "I just thank God I'm alive," Cribb tells WSOC. The two motorists Cribb was helping didn't appear to be injured, per a State Highway Patrol report. (More FedEx stories.)

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