PADUCAH, KY – On a hot summer evening last week, Dustin Wilson, a resident of CenterPoint Recovery Center for Men, jumped on his bike to go to a class on drug and alcohol abuse, as he has done every night for the nearly 4 months he has been working on recovering from his drug addiction.
This night however, was different. Wilson witnessed a car wreck. And, instead of doing what most would do and ride on, he stopped. He more than stopped. As the car began to burn, he saw the driver frantically trying to get back in the car instead of getting further away from the vehicle. After talking with the driver for a second, he realized there was a child strapped in a car seat in the back of the car.
With no regard for his own safety, Wilson crawled into the front seat of the car, under the deployed air bag and into the back seat. He was able to free the child from the car and hand him back to his young mother just as the entire car went up in flames.
Wilson said, “I really didn’t think about anything other than that little boy needed to get out of that car. I don’t feel heroic, I feel like I just did what anyone should do.”
The mother and her son were free and at that point the ambulance and fire trucks had arrived and Wilson quietly went on his way. He didn’t ask or expect thanks and as a matter of fact, didn’t even get the name of the family who he ultimately saved.
“I’ve learned at CenterPoint that one of the many ‘symptoms’ of drug and alcohol abuse is thinking of no one but yourself. So those classes just sort of kicked in for me and I thought of someone else for a change. I’ve never felt so good about myself as I did that night.” He commented.
Currently celebrating its fiftieth year, Four Rivers Behavioral Health is a private, not-for-profit agency that provides comprehensive mental health, substance abuse and developmental/intellectual disability services to clients in Ballard, Calloway, Carlisle, Fulton, Graves, Hickman, Livingston, McCracken, and Marshall Counties.
CenterPoint Recovery Center for Men is a 120-bed, six-month, residential drug treatment center. CenterPoint is managed by Four Rivers Behavioral Health.
