A girl was bloody but alert after she was hit by a Jimmy John’s deliveryman on a bike along University Place Thursday afternoon.

The accident happened in front of Bird Library. Students gathered around the scene to see what had happened, and ambulances and Department of Public Safety cars arrived shortly after. The girl was loaded into an ambulance just before 3:30 p.m.

The deliveryman involved in the accident said he was biking down University Place as he always does. He said he saw the girl but she stopped in the road and it was too late for him to swerve, so he crashed into her. He said he was going about 15-20 miles per hour. The deliveryman’s elbow was scraped from the accident.

Kyra Azzato, a sophomore, said she didn’t see the accident but was nearby when it happened. She said she went to tend to the girl, who Azzato said was bleeding but alert and able to sit up on her own. Azzato said it appeared the event was “a complete accident.”

About an hour after the accident, Azzato said in an email after that she had attended a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps lab in which the ROTC students learned first aid procedures. The lab took place about an hour before the girl was hit, Azzato said.

“We happened to take a real life approach today and did scenarios that we might encounter on campus,” Azzato said in an email. “One happened to be a person getting hit by a car.”

Azzato said because of her ROTC training she knew to instruct someone to call 911, cover the girl with jackets, keep her calm, check her breathing and injuries and start treating her bleeding.

“When I was walking down the street and saw her laying there, I was confident in my ability to administer help to her because of ROTC and I just jumped to action,” Azzato said.

Published on March 5, 2015 at 4:02 pm

Contact Sara: smswann@syr.edu | @saramswann