Lisa Sweeney is a mail carrier from Westerleigh, Staten Island. She knows her route so well that she has names, addresses, and even faces memorized. Not only that, she’s developed into quite a keen observer over her 13 years in the postal service.
She told WABC-TV:
“I’m just aware of everything. It’s a very quiet, quaint area where I deliver the mail, so anything out of the ordinary, a light bulb goes off in my head.”
Her attentive nature allowed her to immediately reach out to rescuers when she realized an elderly woman named Marie Boyer was severely needing help.
Lisa was just going around her route when she noticed something unusual outside of 87-year-old Marie Boyer’s Westerleigh home. There was a growing pile of mail along with trash bins in disarray.
This alerted her to phone the police.
The mail carrier recalls,
“I called 911, and I said, ‘I have a feeling that this woman is in her house, that’s she’s been there for quite a few days.'”
True enough, when the police arrived, they saw the elderly woman lying helplessly on her bedroom floor. They had to break through one of the back windows in the house to rescue her.
Poor Marie had slipped and fallen four days earlier and didn’t have a way of calling for help.
She was in distress, thinking she didn’t want to lose her life in such a state. Marie shared with WABC-TV:
“When I fell to the ground, I couldn’t get up again. Because I had a lot of damage to my body before, and it made it difficult. The windows were closed, and I kept on calling out and telling people to call 911. But nobody could hear me. So that went on for like three days. That’s when I was getting dehydrated. I didn’t want to die that way. I don’t think anybody would want to die in that kind of circumstance.”
The entire time the police were inside Marie’s house, Lisa waited outside, praying. It wasn’t until they came out and shared the good news with her that she was able to breathe a sigh of relief.
She adds,
“When they came out, they told me she was alive. And I cried because I was just happy she was alive.”
Marie couldn’t remember much about what happened, but she was pretty sure about one thing: that she knew more than enough about the kind-hearted mail carrier to know that if there was anyone who would realize something off was happening, it would be Lisa.
An incident that started out unfortunate ended happily, cementing the friendship shared between the two.
It didn’t take long for the two to become like family, even celebrating Marie’s birthday and enjoying spending time together at the senior center where Marie now stays. The grateful elderly woman couldn’t stop praising the heroic mail carrier, saying,
“I think she’s very special. I don’t think she just thinks about herself. She thinks about others.”
Watch the video below to see CBS2’s interview with Marie and her hero!
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