Jessica Williams of Belle, Missouri, a hundred miles west of St. Louis, woke in the wee hours of the morning Friday. She needed to make it to the airport by 3:30 a.m. for a two-leg trip to Washington state to see a weekend of Dave Matthews Band concerts with her best friend.
Jessica Williams, left, of Belle, Mo., and Amy Mendenhall of Farmington snap a photo on a flight to Spokane, Wash., on Friday, Sept. 1, 2023. Williams, a nurse, revived a man who lost consciousness during the flight.
During her connecting flight from Minneapolis to Spokane, Williams, 47, nodded off. Best to catch a few winks before a long night of Matthews’ signature improvised jams at the Gorge Amphitheatre.
A commotion four rows back roused her. A man had slumped over, unconscious.
“I just kind of jumped,” said Williams, a registered nurse. “I don’t remember climbing over my seatmates.”
In seconds, she was next to the unresponsive passenger. She couldn’t find a heartbeat. He wasn’t breathing.
“He was completely gone,” Williams said.
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Flight attendants called for a doctor. There wasn’t one on board. But that wouldn’t matter.
Williams had started a “sternal rub,” a technique to elicit responsiveness. She kneaded her knuckles back and forth along the man’s chest bone.
It worked. He took a big gasp of air.
Everyone else on the crowded Delta flight seemed to breathe out at the same time.
“It was amazing to watch,” said Amy Mendenhall of Farmington, Williams’ concert companion. “I was so humbled.”
The two women have known each other since they were students at Southeast Missouri State University in the late 1990s, where Williams earned her nursing degree. She most recently worked for SSM Health but is now studying to become a nurse practitioner. Mendenhall had never seen her friend in action.
“I didn’t realize how phenomenal she was at her job,” Mendenhall said.
The man labored for sips of air, and Williams detected a faint pulse. She asked him a few questions; he could supply short answers. The man’s name was Bramwell Serede. He was 58 and on the flight alone, heading home to Spokane.
Serede had felt good when he got on the flight, he said Saturday. He was returning from a two-day visit with a friend in Maryland. After a nap, he was uncomfortable and thought a walk through the airplane cabin might help. But when he tried to stand up, he couldn’t.
That’s the last thing he remembers.
“I woke up surrounded,” Serede said. “Jessica was there.”
She stayed at his side for the rest of the three-hour trip. A flight attendant got an oxygen mask for him. The color returned to his face.
Nothing like this had happened to him before, said Serede, who moved to the United States about four years ago to escape the political turmoil in his home country of Kenya.
Williams and the flight crew helped Serede off the plane and into a wheelchair. An Uber picked him up, but not before he and Williams had exchanged phone numbers and he had showered her with thank yous.
Jessica Williams of Belle, Mo., left, and Amy Mendenhall of Farmington attend the Dave Matthews Band concert Friday, Sept. 1, 2023, at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington state.
When Serede got home, he made an appointment with his doctor, ate some food and went to bed.
Williams and Mendenhall still had travel in front of them: a two-and-a-half hour drive to their hotel, then another hour to get to the concert.
Williams has been to dozens of Dave Matthews performances, following the band for almost a quarter of a century. But Friday’s show topped them all.
“Yesterday was so long,” she said Saturday. “But it was one of the best days of my life.”
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