Saving 2 lives: York County deputies stop pregnant woman’s suicide

Deputy Chad Davis tanked up his patrol car on a recent Sunday morning, thinking it might be the start of a slow day – and he could use one. Sundays can run either way.

Deputy Josh Yates was taking inventory of the SWAT gear at the York County Sheriff’s Office District III office in the old National Guard armory on South Cherry Road. He, too, was thinking this might be an easy Sunday.

Before breakfast, these partners would save not one life, but two.

“Doesn’t happen every day,” conceded Davis, 43, who has worked 17 years as a cop – eight of them in York County.

The urgent radio call on Sept. 20 came in about 8:30 a.m.: A woman, seven months’ pregnant, was trying to hang herself behind a home on Holland Road southwest of Rock Hill.

Davis sped off from the county gas pumps near Heckle Boulevard and Cherry Road at Code 3 – blue lights and siren, driving over the speed limit – and rushed the two miles or so toward Holland Road.

“The call came out that she had attempted to hang herself, tried once with a belt,” Davis said, “and that she was outside and trying again with a chain.”

Davis pushed the police cruiser, and his mind raced faster than the car.

Yates, meanwhile, could not just rush away from the SWAT locker, leaving all kinds of weapons unlocked. He knew he had to take precious seconds to close and secure the door. Those seconds seemed like hours to the 30-year-old, eight-year veteran.

Davis, a trained member of the sheriff’s office hostage negotiator team, arrived first.

“I pulled up and I could see her on the bottom step of the ladder,” he said. “She had a chain around her neck, like a choker chain for a dog.”

Davis called out to the woman as he ran, “Stop!”

But she didn’t. Instead, she climbed the ladder and threw the chain over a tree limb.

“I picked up the pace and ran faster toward her,” Davis said. “All the time I am thinking, ‘What am I gonna do?’ ”

By the time Davis skidded to a stop at the foot of the ladder, the woman was at the top, a good eight feet off the ground. One end of the chain was wrapped around her neck, the other around the tree limb.

“You don’t want to do this,” Davis told her. “There are people who love you and care about you.”

But the woman was intent on hurting herself, Davis said, so he did the only thing he could think to do — he grabbed the woman and the ladder in a giant bear hug.

“She was trying to kick off the ladder, trying to kick free,” Davis said. “All the time I was telling her that people care about her, don’t do this – for herself and her family.”

But the woman was distraught, Davis said, and the cheap metal ladder started to bend under the weight of the woman and the force of the struggle.

Davis held the woman up with his left arm and used his right arm to keep hold of her legs and the ladder. Seconds stretched to a minute. A minute became two.

The muscles in Davis’ arms screamed and his legs buckled, but he held firm and did not falter.

Still, Davis – a big, strapping guy at about 6 feet 3 inches tall, 240 pounds – was thinking to himself that, even as strong as he is, he was running out of strength – and the woman was running out of time.

Bouyed by his faith in God, Davis said, he found the will not to give up.

“The Lord was with me,” he said. “There is no doubt.”

Still struggling to hold on and keep the woman from plunging off the ladder, Davis managed to slip his right hand free and reach the radio transmitter on his shirt. He called for Yates, saying he needed his partner and friend faster than fast.

“I was, like, in a Statue of Liberty stance,” Davis said. “I was milked. I couldn’t feel my arms anymore. I was hanging on for dear life.

“I could hear his siren coming. That siren meant help.”

The ladder creaked and started to fail. No way Davis could hold this woman off the ground any longer.

Throughout it all, he kept pleading with the woman not to swing free and end her life.

Finally, his burly partner arrived, more than 6 feet and 200 pounds of solid muscle.

“I ran toward Chad,” Yates said. “He had her by the legs, and the ladder was bent and going, ready to collapse, so I grabbed the front of the ladder.

“You could see the chain, it was choking her tighter. So I just grabbed one side and held on.”

As Yates held one side of the woman and the ladder, Davis still clung to the other side. The woman was swaying under that limb, the chain around her neck.

Yet these Atlases did not shrug.

Davis managed another call to EMS, which had emergency medical technicians nearby, waiting for the deputies to confirm that the scene was safe for them to rush in.

The four EMTs ran to help, along with York County Magistrate Judge Bob Davenport, a firefighter with the Bethesda Volunteer Fire Department who had heard the radio call and dropped everything to rush to the scene.

Davis told them he first needed something other than their medical expertise.

“We need your muscle.”

The seven emergency responders – two deputies, four EMTs and a volunteer firefighter – then carefully lowered the woman down from the top of the bent and mangled ladder.

The woman was crying, Davis said.

The woman was upset, Yates said.

“But she was alive!” both said in unison.

The EMS workers tended to the woman before rushing her to Piedmont Medical Center. The deputies followed closely behind the ambulance.

“The adrenaline, it was still kicking,” Yates said. “We were concerned about the woman and her baby.”

A short time later, hospital officials found the two deputies, still drenched in sweat, their bullet-proof vests stuck to their chests and backs, their faces red and streaked.

“They told us that both were going to be OK,” Davis said.

The two deputies sagged for a second, then each stood tall. They did not say much to each other.

Their eyes said what words could not.

This story was originally published September 29, 2015 at 8:59 AM with the headline "Saving 2 lives: York County deputies stop pregnant woman’s suicide."