Looking back through pictures, Beth Mazgajewski remembers the pain.
[Ads /]
"What you don't see in the picture is that I was still using a walker at the time. I'm holding onto my ex-husband now for dear life to keep me up," said Mazgajewski, who suffered a collapsed lung, 37 fractured bones and internal bleeding from a crash on September 22, 2001.
Mazgajewski was driving onto Haddonfield-Berlin Road across from a gas station and pizza shop when the crash occurred. The impact of the accident totaled her car. Mazgajewski could have died if not for an off-duty EMT.
"He like pried the door open... and he's like, 'Just calm down and just stop moving around,'" she recalled.
Mazgajewski says she's thought about that EMT nearly every day for the past 20 years. She never got to thank him for saving her life. She hopes that changes soon.
"She would love to talk to him and thank him in person," said her brother, David.
[Ads /]
Mazgajewski posted her story in a community group on Facebook and the Cherry Hill EMS saw it. EMS Battalion Chief Dave Milsted says the records from the accident are gone, but the department is trying to help her find her hero.
"It would be an awesome story... we're here to help people and just to have closure," said Milsted.
If not for that stranger, Mazgajewski may have never walked down the aisle less than a year later.
"That day changed the entire course of my life," she said.