Central High School student renders first aid to gunshot victim on her way home from school

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE) - The quick actions of a Central High School student on the way home from school may have saved the life of a gunshot victim on Wednesday.

“I had to do something,”16-year-old Nylaia Carter said. “I’m trained to stop the bleeding, so I had to do something, anything.”

Nylaia relied on emergency first aid she learned in class as a sophomore.

Using her sweatshirt to make a tourniquet, she stopped the bleeding and kept the man conscious until paramedics arrived.

”I was proud of my daughter because she told me to, ‘pull over Dad,’” her father Adam Carter said. “And I didn’t want to pull over. It had been a long day. I wanted to get home.”

But Nylaia did not hesitate.

Police said the man was shot two and a half miles away, in the 3700 block of West Broadway.

He tried to drive himself to the hospital, but the loss of blood cut his journey short, ending next to Central High School.

”Just blood. Blood everywhere,” Nylaia said. “His clothes were just a mess.”

Days after leaving the scene, Nylaia and her father visited the man in the hospital. They said he was grateful and surprised to find out she was only 16.

”And he remembered her being there,” Carter said. “But she had a book bag, so he thought she was the paramedic. So we had a chance to talk to him and pray with him and I think that she has a lifelong friend now.”

”Yeah, I did what I was supposed to do,” Nylaia said. “He’s alive and that’s all that matters.”

Nylaia said she hopes to earn a basketball scholarship and eventually go into the field of physical therapy.

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