AUBURNDALE, Fla. — It was a hug that was long overdue.
Monday night, at Auburndale City Hall, a tearful Tamara Huber-Lucas wrapped her arms around Dwayne Hingos, the man who saved her life.
“You’re a hero,” she told him. “I don’t even know how to thank you.”
Back on the afternoon of Oct. 18, Hingos, a dispatcher at Medline in Auburndale, was taking a break outside his company’s large warehouse when he heard a huge splash.
“It just happened so quick,” Hingos remembered.
As it turns out, a driver having a medical episode had lost consciousness, darted down a hill, and plowed directly into a retention pond outside Medline.
He didn’t hesitate. A coworker helped unlock a gate, allowing Hingos to get to the pond quickly.
“I just started running,” he said.
He ran at least the length of a football field, jumped into the water, and found out the alligator-infested pond was also very deep.
“After you get about five feet in, it really drops. It was a lot deeper than I thought,” Hingos said.
He swam up to the car and ultimately pulled the driver out of her car’s open sunroof just seconds before the vehicle became completely submerged.
Hingos was recognized for his heroism at an Auburndale City Commission meeting Monday night.
“Your decisive action, while putting your personal safety at risk, undoubtedly saved a precious human life,” City Manager Jeff Tillman told Hingos before presenting him with the commendation.
However, what happened immediately before was even better than the recognition.
At the back of the commission chamber, he reunited with the woman he saved, Huber-Lucas, whom he hadn’t seen since the day of the crash. The two shared a hearty hug.
“You don’t realize — you really don’t — you saved the whole family,” she told him.
Huber-Lucas, a single mom from Lakeland, was on the way to pick up her 18-month-old from daycare when she blacked out and ended up in the pond.
“The angel God sent me just kept telling me to go to the sunroof. Go to the sunroof! And that angel was Mr. Dewayne,” Huber-Lucas said.
Monday, Hingos didn’t just get to meet the woman he saved. He also met her toddler, Jermaine, who still has a mom only because of Hingos’ heroism.
“If my family was in this situation, I’d want somebody to do the same thing,” Hingos said. “I’ve never even thought that I’d do something like this. It just — I don’t know — it just happened.”
