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Stephanie Carpluk, a 19-year-old manager in training, was working by herself that morning. She was bundled in numerous layers, including several shirts and sweatpants under her jeans. She'd put up her hair and wrapped a long black scarf, a Christmas gift from her grandmother, around her neck.
O'Leary pulled up to the car wash around 9:30, and Carpluk emerged from the outdoor booth, collected $8, and directed him onto the automated track. Rollers popped up around the Chevy's tires and pulled the car, with O'Leary inside, down the track. Carpluk headed back inside. She deposited O'Leary's money into the register, triggering an alert that it was time to take the money to the office safe on the other side of the car wash. She removed the big bills from the drawer and locked the booth.
Carpluk walked in front of O'Leary's Chevy and approached the office. She was about to reach for her keys when she felt a sharp tug on her neck. Then she was violently yanked backward off her feet. There was no time to scream. Her scarf had cinched around her neck and she couldn't breathe.
Carpluk clutched desperately at her scarf, but the cloth just tightened around her throat. As she struggled to free herself, she lost one of her Air Jordans, and then the other. All the while, the scarf pulled tighter. Finally, she was unable to move. The last thing she remembers seeing before blacking out was the wheels of the red Chevy moving out from under the brushes.
The hoses had begun to clear the soapsuds from O'Leary's windows. He'd seen Carpluk's blurry form approach his car from the left and then cross in front of it. Then she'd appeared again, still fuzzy through the water-blurred windshield, next to a piece of equipment to his right. Was she installing a brush on the machine? Was she moving the hydraulic hose that powered the brush?
Finally, the windshield dried enough for O'Leary to see through. He was horrified. The brush had caught Carpluk and pinned her against its powerful motorized shaft. He realized then what she'd been doing: desperately trying to wrench herself free.
O'Leary jumped out of the car and ran to Carpluk. Her body was limp, and she was in a seated position against the brush, but there was nothing underneath her. She was suspended just above the ground.
With his car rolling away on the track and water spraying down on him, O'Leary remembered the Puma knife in his front pocket. He unfolded the three-inch blade and locked it into position. Then he tried to jam his thumb between the skin of Carpluk's neck and the scarf so he could saw through the cloth. But the scarf was wrapped so tightly, he couldn't get his finger under it.
He sought out the spot where the scarf was caught on the brush shaft and began cutting it. The scarf was wrapped around Carpluk's neck twice and several more times around the base of the machine. Sawing as hard as he could, O'Leary pulled at the material with his free hand, until suddenly Carpluk slumped to the ground.
O'Leary was relieved, until he got down on his knees and looked into her face. "She was white and wasn't breathing," he says. Leaning over Carpluk's body on the wet floor, "I was thinking, Come on, you can't do this to me after I got you out," he recalls. He remembered learning mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a scuba diving course years before. He tipped Carpluk's head back, carefully pinched her nose, and breathed several puffs of air into her mouth. Then he did it again. Finally, she coughed, opened her eyes, and began to gag and spit up. O'Leary's eyes welled up.
Carpluk couldn't move her neck. The pain was burning, brutal, like nothing she had ever felt. She was shoeless and soaked. And then it occurred to her that she had almost died. She sobbed uncontrollably in O'Leary's arms. If she had waited to go to the safe until O'Leary's car was clear, "no one would have saved me," she later recounted. O'Leary later discovered the Chevy, undamaged, on a snowbank outside the car wash.
Today he has what Deb, his wife, calls a little shrine honoring his heroic moment: a pile of newspaper clippings, an award from the American Legion, letters from the police chief, the mayor, even the governor. "They've all said nice things," says O'Leary. "But the most important thing is that Stephanie is okay."
Carpluk spent several days in a head collar in the intensive care unit of Springfield's Baystate Medical Center with an array of bruises, two black eyes, and a thick red welt circling her neck.
As she recuperates, Carpluk has taken two different lessons from her close call. "Seize life while you have it," she says, "and be careful what you wear."
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