On a hunch, Conemaugh Township Police Officer Collin Hargnett drove up a lonely road while on patrol and found a man stumbling around with a gunshot wound on the left side of his chest.
By Patrick Buchnowski – Source The Tribune-Democrat, Johnstown, Pa.
TIRE HILL, PA—Collin Hargnett awoke one Sunday last month with a strange inclination.
“I was thinking I should go to the water tower,” he said.
Hargnett has been an officer with Conemaugh Township Police Department for a year and a half. He was working the day shift that Sunday when he followed his gut instinct and drove up Keafer Hill Road.
“I honestly can’t tell you why, but I was thinking about it all morning,” Hargnett said. “It’s not someplace I normally would go. So I go up there, and sure enough…”
He drove his patrol car up the lonely road to the water tower. What he saw made him hit the brakes.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, crap!’ ” he recalled.
A pickup truck was backed up the road and a young man was outside, stumbling around.
“It was Sunday morning and I initially thought it might be an intoxicated person, somebody who was maybe out partying in the woods overnight,” Hargnett said. “I went up to him and realized it was more serious. He had a gunshot wound on the left side of his chest and blood all over his shirt. I could see a firearm laying there.”
Hargnett said he ran back to the patrol car for bandages to control the bleeding and placed the man on his side so that his opposite lung would not fill with blood.
“He was fading in and out of consciousness,” Hargnett said. “I was able to put pressure on the wound until EMS got there.”
Conemaugh Township EMS arrived within minutes to perform “life-saving measures,” he said.
The man was taken to Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center in Johnstown, where he was treated for a gunshot wound. He is recovering and has returned to his job, Conemaugh Township police Chief Vincent Zangaglia said.
The chief would not give the man’s name or say how the wound was inflicted.
If not for Hargnett being in the right place at the right time, the outcome would have been different, Zangaglia said.
“The man would have died,” Zangaglia said. “I really believe that. When he got to the hospital, his body temperature was only 88 degrees. He was very close to hypothermia, with the shock and loss of blood.”
The Conemaugh Township supervisors and the police chief presented Hargnett with a letter of commendation for saving the man’s life.
“He’s just one of the great officers that we have and is deserving of the commendation for his actions that day,” Zangaglia said.
Hargnett said he remains puzzled over the sudden impulse to drive to the water tower.
“I don’t know if somebody was telling me that something was going to happen up there,” he said. “I honestly can’t tell you.”
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