A car is burning. A man is trapped inside. His only hope rests with strangers

First there is fire, and only fire. Everything else stands still. The small red SUV, the man inside, the road around it — all freeze in place, save the orange glow and the whipping flames. Then come the people. They come running. Less quickly than you might expect, as if they’re pondering what can be done as they get closer. They tap the windows. They pull on the doors. The driver is stuck. The fire grows. They pull harder. The doors won’t budge. More people come now. Seven, eight. Nine or 10 if you count those in the background. Black and white. Men and women. Young and old — they pull together. They pull harder still. They make no progress. The fire grows.
The attempted rescue unfolds in the palm of my hand, or anyone’s hand. It unfolds on my smartphone, and compared to the funny cats and cooking tutorials and clips from prestige TV, it’s impossible to scroll on. This video demands attention, as indicated by the astounding number of views.
The rescue continues with an explosion. A torrent of fire smacks everyone backward, like the crack of an enormous whip. The fire is beyond their efforts now. It’s two stories tall. It consumes the driver’s side of the car. The man inside must be dead. If not now, then certainly soon. And yet, they keep coming back.
If they don’t, the man is going to die. The flames are only getting bigger. Hotter. Nastier. The entire car could explode any second. Little pieces of it are already detonating one by one. There are so many reasons not to run back. Another belch of flames only confirms it. They don’t know this man. They don’t have to help this man. Yet they do. Again and again and again.
They manage to break a window, and now real progress begins. They hoist him out by his ankles. BANG! Another explosion crackles through the screen. This time, only a few rescuers back away. One stumbles out of the frame, but most stay in place, as fragments of metal and plastic and glass spray their ankles and feet, and the bottom of the car burns like hot coals. They bear it. They stand in the middle of it. They finally pull the man out, and four of them scurry away with his body. They carry him out of view, while the car burns and burns, leaving only steel bones.
I hadn’t been able to get my mind off the 59-second clip — shot in April 2024 along Interstate 94 near St. Paul, Minnesota — since I first saw it. By then it, or other edits of it, had been shared everywhere. One version attracted over eight million views on YouTube. CNN, TMZ, the New York Post, Fox News, the Daily Mail, the BBC, The Washington Post, ABC’s “Good Morning America” — they all picked up the story. It proved irresistible, tailored perfectly to quick-hit digital sensibilities, as well as the most universal, most pressing question humans can face: whether the people in the frame will live or die. That made the footage gripping enough, but there was something else.
At a time of intense national division, with politicians aggravating fault lines between race, national origin, gender and other identifiers, the video is striking because of the diverse array of people involved. The man in the car, it turns out, is a white, 71-year-old lawyer from Ohio, while the first man to arrive at his side is an Ethiopian immigrant who works at the post office. The other rescuers include a 32-year-old physical therapist with long, red hair; an older white man wearing sweatpants and thong flip-flops with white socks; and another young Ethiopian immigrant with a car that just happens to have a camera running when he jumps out.
I visited Minneapolis in September hoping to meet the people behind the viral video. I wanted to know, foremost, what kind of person does what they did. Coming from so many backgrounds, from so many places, I wondered what they shared that made them put so much at risk to save a stranger. Especially after I saw a lesser-known video of the incident, captured by a stationary Department of Transportation camera and from a completely different angle — one that revealed that while about 10 people did stop, dozens did not, the cars creeping by, their drivers and passengers rubbernecking but doing nothing to help. Why did some run toward the fire, while others watched?
The man in the car, the 71-year-old lawyer, has wavy white hair and thick black spectacles and plays in a band. His name is Sam Orbovich. He moved to Minnesota in 1982 when his wife, Cindy, accepted a job as a professor at Macalester College. As she rose through the ranks of academia, Sam practiced law with an emphasis on residential health care providers. He argued multiple cases before the Minnesota Supreme Court, and by the time of his accident, he’d been presented with two lifetime achievement awards.
He also raised a family with Cindy — a son, Alex, and a daughter, Anna. About a year before his accident, he’d told his bosses at the largest law firm in Minnesota he was ready to retire, inspired by a friend who emphasized the importance of having a next chapter in life. He had a grandson by then, too, and he wanted to spend time with him. But then a few major cases came up, and he felt guilty handing them off. So he stayed, no matter how much his inner voice urged him not to.
One of the men who saved him, the Ethiopian immigrant with a car camera running, is Kadir Tolla, a 34-year-old entrepreneur who came to the U.S. in 2004, when he was 14. He fled a civil war that threatened every able-bodied adult. His father had already escaped with some of Kadir’s older siblings, first to Kenya, and later to Minneapolis. With Kadir approaching the age of warfare himself, his dad brought him along. He spoke no English and struggled in school, but after about six months, he started to adjust. He started to make friends. He started to dream.
After high school, Kadir moved to Memphis and started a trucking company, which allowed him to see more of the U.S. The tragic death of his nephew in a robbery-gone-wrong pulled him back to Minnesota, and to a woman he’d known since high school. He and Heaylan Omer married in 2022 and, together, started the Second Home Adult Day Center, an activity center for “functionally impaired adults.” His first child — a daughter named Mi’aa — was born last November. He’d given a lot of thought to how he wanted to raise Mi’aa; how he wanted her childhood to look different from his own. He never wanted her to fear violence as he had, nor did he want her to have to start over. He wanted stability.
Everyone involved in Sam Orbovich’s rescue shares some version of this truth. They all have a lot to live for. They all have a lot at stake. Lacie Kramer, the redheaded 32-year-old, has her “dream job” at a physical therapy practice where she caters to young figure skaters — like the girl she once was — and a Pomeranian puppy named Ragnarok. Michael Coy, a 53-year-old UPS driver, has two kids close to Lacie’s age and endured a brutal divorce many years ago. He’d found his legs in Thailand, where he met a woman and remarried in 2017; he’s never been happier than with her. And Dave Klepaida, a state employee who played perhaps the largest role in saving Sam Orbovich, is approaching retirement age himself — although who knows when he’ll go through with it. He’s spent his entire career — his entire life — around cars and engines, first as a gas station attendant; then in the towing business; and for the last 10 years on behalf of the state. He wouldn’t want to do anything else.
Their unique interests and backstories converged on the evening of April 18, 2024, in the fiery flash of an instant. None of them had any time to think about what had gotten them there, or why they did what they did. They hadn’t had a chance to consider it yet. Except, maybe, for Sam himself.
Sam spent the morning working from home to visit with his sister, then dropped her off at the airport en route to his office to finish the workday there. Around 6 p.m., he texted Cindy, telling her he was about to head home. He fetched his CR-V from the valet in downtown Minneapolis, then started the same drive he takes every day.
No one who saved him, however, was on their usual commute.
Lacie, the physical therapist, was trying to make it to a friend’s continuing education presentation across town after work. Michael, the UPS driver, had just gotten into Minneapolis after a trucking trip, but because of a communications mix-up, he’d accidentally dropped his rig at the wrong facility; he, too, had to head across town before he could clock out. He was on his way there when he saw the fire. “It shouldn’t have happened,” he said later. “I should not have been there.” He thinks about that a lot.
Kadir was about to head home in his Tesla when he got a call from a client who needed after-hours assistance. He headed that way, toward Interstate 94. En route, he spotted a woman in a pickup truck stalled on the side of the road. He stopped and asked if she needed help. He’d made that a habit because of his time as a truck driver. He’d been stuck in ditches many times, and always got out thanks to the goodwill of strangers. In this case, the pickup truck wouldn’t budge. The woman told Kadir a tow truck was already on its way, but thanked him anyway. So he left, bound for Saint Paul, and I-94.
He was approaching his exit when, up ahead and just out of view, Sam’s red Honda CR-V sailed into the right-most lane. As the asphalt curved left, the car continued straight and jumped the shoulder and the grass embankment, kicking up a trail of gray dirt and dust. It didn’t accelerate or swerve or flash emergency lights. Nor did its drift have an obvious cause, like another driver’s aggression or the telltale overcorrection of someone caught texting and driving. At a few seconds past 6:34 p.m., Sam Orbovich was encased by 3,500 pounds of metal and plastic and glass, hurtling toward a lamp post weighing hundreds if not thousands of pounds, at close to 70 miles per hour. And he wasn’t slowing down.
Sam’s CR-V toppled the post like a fallen domino, but the damage to his car was severe. The collision crumpled the bumper and snipped the fuel line, leaving a trail of fire across the dry roadside grass. The driver’s side door was pushed up against a steel guardrail, blocking his potential escape. Gasoline trickled. The flames rose.
A few feet up ahead, Tesfaye “Tes” Deyasso, the postal worker, parked his van on the shoulder and sprinted toward the wreckage. He was followed closely by Michael, whose 18-wheeler was now parked in the middle of the road. They found Sam hunched over the steering wheel, knocked unconscious. Tes tried pulling the doors open. He was able to crack them briefly, but the guardrail smacked them shut, like a bent playing card snapping back to form. Michael rushed toward the other side and opened the passenger-side door. He called out to Sam, and he was able to wake him. But Sam was still visibly dazed. He didn’t seem to recognize the urgency of the situation. At least not right away. Michael talked him into removing his seat belt, then told him to move toward his voice.
On the other side of the car, Kadir parked his Tesla and joined Tes in prying at those doors with abandon. He placed his leg on the railing for leverage, less pulling than heaving. Lacie joined in, along with the older man wearing sweatpants and flip-flops with white socks who was never identified. He emptied a fire extinguisher on the car’s underbelly, hoping to slow the flames and their march toward Sam. It’s hard to say whether it worked, but if it did, it wasn’t for long.
About 50 seconds had passed, and the fire was growing. The heat had melted the soles of Michael’s shoes. “We have to break the window,” Lacie said, just as Kadir appeared with a piece of fiberglass debris and futilely slammed it against the glass, bloodying his hand. Explosions — from the tires and the radiator and the oil pan — cracked the air every few seconds. Kadir began to suspect the worst — until Dave Klepaida pulled up in a reflective orange shirt and a Department of Transportation truck.
As part of the state’s FIRST program, aka “Highway Helpers,” Dave’s job is to cruise the streets and keep traffic moving. That night, like the others, he technically wasn’t supposed to be in the area. It’s part of his standard route, but he was only in that spot, at just past 6:34 p.m., because he was heading home an hour early. His experience had told him the smoke rising in the distance was probably a grass fire as he sauntered that way. Then he saw what really awaited. He activated his emergency lights and ran.
For all 10 years with the state of Minnesota, Dave carried around a red device on his keychain called a “Resqme” — a window-punch that works like a finger prick at the doctor: You press the spring-loaded gadget to the glass, and it shoots out a small metal spike. Outside of training, he’d never had to use it before. And part of him wondered whether it might be too late. The fire had spread to the driver’s side, spewing from the hood, consuming the front tire and radiating from below.
He punched out the back window on pure instinct and training, then the front, brushing away the shards of glass with his thick work gloves. Michael screamed from behind him, telling Sam to put his feet out the window. Sam’s ankles popped free, but with more oxygen pouring into the car, the fire grew even faster. Thick clouds of gray smoke rushed out all around him.
Kadir grabbed Sam’s left ankle, and Michael grabbed his right. Just as they started to pull, another explosion detonated beneath the car. Sam, still dazed, wrapped his hands around the door frame. Lacie ran back in and told him to let go. With that, the force of the rescuers almost flung his body out. With Kadir and Tes grabbing a leg, and Michael and Lacie supporting Sam’s shoulders, they shuffled away from the flaming wreckage.
Firefighters later estimated Sam had 10, maybe 15 more seconds before the point of no return. Perhaps they told him that at the scene, but if they did, he doesn’t remember it. He doesn’t remember much at all, including what caused the accident. But remarkably, aside from some singed hair and some scrapes on his back from the window glass, he was completely fine. Even his sport coat survived in good working condition. He was discharged from the hospital that very night, without so much as a tube of ointment.
He got home still not knowing the extent of what he’d escaped. He spent the night sorting through his smoky clothes and taking a long shower, followed by a trim of his sticky, burnt hair. He sent a few emails to family explaining what had happened, and he went to bed. The next day, he saw some still photographs of the accident on a community Facebook page. The gravity started to set in. Especially when his sister from Ohio reached out via email the following day. “Did you know there was a video?” she asked. “I don’t think you should watch it.”
Sam, like so many others, clicked on it right away.
In his rush to help, Kadir had left the door to his Tesla open. That triggered the car’s many cameras to start recording. He watched the footage alone the next day, then decided to share it more widely, he told me in September. I met him outside a red brick building just a few blocks from where George Floyd was murdered. Wearing black loafers with sparkling crystals and a thick silver chain, he explained that he thinks Americans have an unfair reputation. “White kills Black, Black hates Asians, Asians hate immigrants — all this stuff,” he says. “But the actual Americans, if it wasn’t for social media, they help each other.”
Mostly, at least.
There’s also a version of the Tesla footage filmed from a different camera angle that he refuses to release. He says it depicts a man running toward the accident — then thinking better of it and running away. He doesn’t want that seconds-long snippet to get out and potentially ruin this man’s life, with so many Americans seemingly eager to jump into online pile-ons. But when he reviewed the rest of the footage of the car fire, he thought, “Let me share this good story, because I know it could change the way people look at this country.”
His decision caused a digital monsoon. The video amassed hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok. The Twin Cities Fox affiliate reached out, asking to use the footage and to interview Kadir. By week’s end, it’d been shared by nearly every national outlet, and many international ones. Michael Coy saw it first on TikTok; then caught Kadir’s appearance on the local news; then flew to New York to appear on the “Tamron Hall” show. Dr. Phil reached out. Dave Klepaida thankfully had a communications manager to handle the deluge at the Minnesota Department of Transportation.
Sam Orbovich wanted nothing to do with the frenzy. For one thing, he was still traumatized. For another, after he’d watched the video his sister sent him, he felt like he wasn’t the story. The people who saved him — they should be the ones in the limelight. “I did not have an appreciation of how much danger I was in until I saw the video,” he says. “And when you see those folks get pushed back because the flames are erupting, and they keep coming back to the car — that’s incredible.”
He drafted a statement and had his assistant send it to all the reporters. “I am alive today because several good Samaritans and professional first responders saved my life,” he wrote. “My family and I are incredibly grateful to these heroes.” But Sam didn’t want to slip into the shadows completely, either, as the letter made clear at the very end. “I look forward,” he wrote, “to thanking them all in person.”
Almost a month later, Sam had identified six of his rescuers — Kadir, Michael, Lacie, Tes, Dave and Tessa Sand, a nurse who made sure he was safe once he was out of the car. On May 14, he invited the group to Nina’s, a chic coffee shop a few blocks from his condo in St. Paul’s Cathedral Hill neighborhood. He got the owners to keep the place open after hours, with catered coffee and pastries as well as pizza and halal food. The purpose was mostly celebratory. To say thanks. Sam had come a long way, having gone to a few sessions with a trauma therapist and going so far as to crack jokes about what happened. “I’m glad you guys didn’t know I was a lawyer,” he said. Dave even gave Sam a special gift: the very Resqme tool he’d used to bust the window and free him. But beyond the pleasantries, Sam Orbovich was also curious about something. He wanted to know why they did what they did. The unsatisfactory answer is that they don’t know. Almost universally, they describe it as a reaction — whether something engrained genetically or the result of special training. It didn’t feel like a choice.
That tracks with emerging research. Stephanie Preston, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, told me that “heroic altruism” — the term academics use for acts of heroism that benefit strangers — is the result of a complex mental calculus taking place at a speed impossible to process in the moment. When the human brain sees a situation like Sam’s car accident, it cycles through a series of questions. Namely three big ones: How urgent is the problem? How big is the risk? And what can I really do to help? The answers can be more subjective than they seem.
Urgency, her theory suggests, is deeply ingrained in humans by our mammalian biology. In her 2022 book, “The Altruistic Urge,” she proposes an “offspring care theory” — the idea that most mammal newborns, including humans, are born helpless and require intense attention — to explain the roots of heroic altruism. From an evolutionary perspective, this has made us extraordinarily sensitive to situations that require immediate action. But heroic altruism is also “adaptive,” she says; our thinking can change given the particulars of a situation. Different people are going to assess risk differently. And some people are genetically predisposed to more confidence, to a belief that they can help, while others are more likely to act on their perceived limitations and do nothing. Considering these answers and other questions — Will I get fired if I don’t keep driving? Do I need to pick up my kids? Will I get seriously hurt? Is the driver still alive? — our brain spits out a binary, reactionary output: Yes or no. Right now.
The ultimate decision of whether to act or not happens too fast to unpack at the time it’s made. It happens so fast, in fact, it’s hard to call it a decision at all. “We didn’t know what Sam’s color was,” Kadir says. “We didn’t know what race he was. We didn’t know if he was straight. We didn’t know where he worked. We never asked. The only thing that mattered to us: There’s a person in that car who needs to be saved.”
Indeed, heroic altruism operates as more of a mental reflex. And it’s a reflex that isn’t exactly rare. Since its founding in 1904, the Carnegie Hero Fund has recognized over 10,000 people for risking “death or serious physical injury to an extraordinary degree while saving or attempting to save the life of another person.” But is acting to save a stranger, then, something we can choose to do — or something predetermined by our cognitive makeup? Is that reflex something we can develop — or something we either have or don’t?
Watching the video again — and again — after talking to Sam and the people who saved him, that’s the question I kept coming back to. What they did in the video is “remarkable,” Preston told me, because they just keep going back, explosion after explosion. No one would have faulted them for stopping, but they didn’t. And confronted with the evidence of the many people who didn’t stop to help, I wondered: Would I?
Five months after the accident, Sam Orbovich welcomed me into his condo in Cathedral Hill. Oil paintings hung on the wall. A humidified instrument case held his guitars and violins. He’d officially retired on June 7, less than two months after the accident that nearly killed him. Not because he wasn’t going to anyway, he insisted. Nearly dying was more of a final nudge. Since then, he’d spent a lot of time enjoying that next chapter he wanted. Traveling. Spending time with his 4-year-old grandson. But he’d also spent a lot of time thinking about that day.
The video pops up randomly on social media — for everyone involved — and whether looking directly at it or not, Sam suffers the occasional flare of something like survivor’s guilt. “Any one of those people could have been seriously burned by those flames and had their life changed forever,” he said. “And so you’ve got that to cope with.” He’s done so by taking up one more, less expected retirement hobby: He’s devoted himself to getting every possible recognition for the people who saved him.
He sends applications on their behalf all over, including one to the Carnegie Hero Fund that’s still pending. He also stays in touch, writing email updates and learning about where they’re at. For the most part, the answer is back to normal. Michael Coy is back on the road for UPS, with plans to eventually retire to Thailand. Dave Klepaida is back on the road, too — a welcome reprieve from the initial tidal wave of interviews. Lacie Kramer is enjoying her dream job in physical therapy. And Kadir Tolla is working to grow his business and raise his daughter, who turned 1 in November. And remember that red brick building near where George Floyd was killed? He recently bought it. It’s a massive complex, housing a church and, formerly, a school. He has big plans for renovations, including an expansion of his adult day care business and an event venue. He registered the property in Mi’aa’s name.
All of them remain bonded by this accident of circumstance, and by something featured prominently in Sam’s living room. Amid the oil paintings and string instruments, perched on a shelf in a mahogany frame, sits a small and red item that would be puzzling if you didn’t know what you were looking at: the Resqme gifted to him by Dave Klepaida. “That’s what saved me,” he said, handing it to me.
I asked him, finally, the question I’d been avoiding. If the roles were reversed, would Sam rush toward the flames to save a stranger? I suspected he’d say yes, without a doubt. How could he say anything else? Of course he’d pay it forward! Of course he’d face the fire! Of course! But Sam surprised me.
The night before his own accident, he told me, his sister was in town for a brief layover. He’d just picked her up from the airport when, not far from his home, he came across a brutal traffic accident. A lone car was flipped over, resting on its roof. It wasn’t on fire, and first responders had already arrived. So Sam kept driving. He doesn’t regret it; there really was nothing he could do. But it does make him wonder. What if there was something he could have done? “I’d like to think that I would … but I don’t know,” he told me. “I couldn’t say if it’s something I would definitely do.”
No one really can. Not until it happens. And that — more than the fire or the drama or the diverse intersection of humanity — is what makes the video of Sam’s rescue so gripping. It’s a frightening realization; one that’s easy to dismiss at first. “I would absolutely help him!” screams our conscience from the comfort of the couch. But the video evidence suggests it isn’t so simple. None of us know. Not even the man who would be dead otherwise.
After I handed Sam back the framed Resqme that saved his life, he opened a drawer in the kitchen, pulled out a little plastic bag with a little plastic device inside, and handed it to me — my own Gatorade-green Resqme. They’ve become his go-to gift for family and friends. He carries one everywhere himself.
As I left Sam’s condo, I thumbed over the plastic, a powerful reminder in my jacket pocket. None of us know how we’ll react when faced with a moment of need — a car fire, a slip-and-fall, a child swept away by a strong current. Until the moment comes, the best we can do — the only thing we can do — is be prepared.
And then choose.
This story appears in the December 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.