Keeping the Faith: A Hero in Our Midst

Guerneville's Evan Redmon knew just what to do when someone started yelling "Help!"

Evan Redmon with his children Finley, age 11; Alana, age 20; and Caden, age 22.

By Bob Jones

A fellow I’ve known since he was born turns out to be a hero in our midst. Evan Redmon was raised in Guerneville, went to Guerneville School, attended the Guerneville Community Church, and graduated from El Molino High School.

In 2007, Evan graduated from Montana State University and now is a tall, strong, robust man with just the first glimpse of maturity’s gray appearing here and there. He fishes successfully in local and international waters (I’ve seen the impressive pictures), and he’s working on getting his golf game down to five or six over par.

For years, Evan has been proprietor of his own business, Precision Painting. By all accounts, he’s one heck of a good painter of houses, barns, and most anything like that. He lives in Redding now, but he accepts jobs here in Sonoma County and stays with his parents, Ron and Joyce Redmon, in Guerneville when he does. Recently, Evan took a job painting a 19th-century farmhouse near Cloverdale.

Just before driving south, he allowed his kids to prevail in their pleadings for a new couch, and so Evan strapped the old green corduroy couch to the back of his pickup and hauled it to the Redding refuse dump. It was toward evening, but there were two others there: one an older fellow with ordinary stuff to throw away, and the other a young man with, among other things, a large mirror to get rid of.

When the young man lifted the mirror to toss it on the refuse pile, it broke, and a sharp edge of it cut into his arm, severing an artery.

Evan didn’t see this, but he heard a loud voice desperately calling, “Help! Help!” He found the young man standing in a pool of blood three feet across, with blood spurting and running down his arm. Evan could see that the bleeding had to be stopped right away, so he got the strap that had held his old couch to his pickup and wrapped it six times around the bleeding arm and held it tight. In the process, Evan got covered with blood, but he stopped the bleeding.

Evan says he is not good when it comes to blood, and he felt like he might pass out. He had the older man grab the strap, but he couldn’t hold it tight enough, and the bleeding started again. So Evan took hold and somehow rose above his aversion to blood.

“A kind of instinct takes over,” he says, “and you know it’s important to do everything you can.”

During this time, the older fellow was calling 911.

While Evan was fighting his dizziness and holding on to the makeshift tourniquet, the young man said he felt like he might be dying. Evan did his best to assure his patient that everything would be alright, that help was on the way.

In less than 10 minutes, an ambulance arrived. The EMTs took over and got fluids going into the young man and hauled him off to the hospital. One of the EMTs said, “That fella wouldn’t have made it if he had bled a minute or two longer.”

Turns out the young man has a wife and two young sons. After he was out of the woods, the young man’s wife wanted to know who came to her husband’s rescue. Nobody knew. But the wife was determined. She put a description of Evan on the internet, and one of his friends saw it and told Evan about it.

So the life saver and the one whose life was saved got together for dinner, compliments of a grateful family.

“Seeing them all together was overwhelming, the best part of the whole experience,” Evan told me. “It was an interesting way to meet new friends,” he said.

Evan also wondered about the “ifs” of the matter. “If I hadn’t been talked into a new couch, I wouldn’t have been at the dump that evening. If I hadn’t been going to Cloverdale for a painting job, I wouldn’t have been throwing away the old couch right then. If I didn’t have that old strap in the truck, I couldn’t have tied off the bleeding.”

Ifs like that come with a measure of awe attached, Evan and I agreed.

Evan’s mother and father say simply, “We are so proud of him.” Many of us are. And we’re grateful that this one who grew up among us seemed to know in his bones what was important and what he had to do.

Bob Jones, who is 91, has written his column, “Keeping the Faith,” for local weeklies in west county for more than 50 years. He was pastor of the Guerneville and Monte Rio Community Churches for 20 years, living in Guerneville since 1966. Bob keeps swearing that he’s done with his column, but he keeps finding interesting things worth writing about. We’re proud to publish his work.

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