Teen gives first aid to gunshot victim on her way home from school

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE/Gray News) - The quick actions of a Kentucky high school student on the way home may have saved the life of a gunshot victim.

Nylaia Carter, 16, made her father pull over when she saw the victim on the drive home from Louisville’s Central High School. She relied on emergency first aid she learned in class as a sophomore to help the man.

“I had to do something,” Nylaia Carter told WAVE. “I’m trained to stop the bleeding, so I had to do something, anything.”

Using her sweatshirt to make a tourniquet, the teenager stopped the bleeding and kept the man conscious until paramedics arrived.

“I was proud of my daughter because she told me to ‘Pull over, Dad,’” said her father, Adam Carter. “And I didn’t want to pull over. It had been a long day. I wanted to get home.”

But Nylaia Carter did not hesitate to help.

Police said the man was shot two and a half miles away. He tried to drive himself to the hospital, but the loss of blood cut his journey short, ending next to Central High School.

“Just blood. Blood everywhere,” Nylaia Carter said. “His clothes were just a mess.”

Days after leaving the scene, Nylaia Carter and her father visited the man in the hospital. They said he was grateful and surprised to find out she was only 16.

“And he remembered her being there,” Adam Carter said. “But she had a bookbag, so he thought she was the paramedic. So, we had a chance to talk to him and pray with him, and I think that she has a lifelong friend now.”

“Yeah, I did what I was supposed to do,” Nylaia Carter said. “He’s alive, and that’s all that matters.”

The 16-year-old said she hopes to earn a basketball scholarship and eventually go into the field of physical therapy.

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