Great Yarmouth’s Marina Centre security officer saves a man’s life
Great Yarmouth, England Sept 26 2020
A security guard who jumped into “incident mode” after finding a man with a knife wound on his nightly patrol says he owes his composure to first aid training.
Chris Church, 37, from Lowestoft, has been a security officer at Great Yarmouth’s Marina Centre for the past seven months.
But other than the “eeriness” of patrolling a demolished building, and the occasional attempted digger-theft in the middle of the night, Mr Church said nothing was as startling as the events of Sunday, September 20.
He said: “I was in the middle of my 10pm patrol when two people came running towards me, saying there was a man with a knife wound.
“Immediately, I went into incident mode. I put on my rubber gloves, grabbed my torch and went after him. It was about 10.25pm.
“I ran after the man to the beach, where I found him in the water.
“I tried to calm him down – and convinced him I was here to help.
“He was up to his neck in the water. The whole thing was pretty terrifying.
“Once I managed to coax him out, I laid him down on the sand.
“There was a lot of blood.
“I held his head and neck with one hand, and applied pressure to the wound with the other.
“For about five minutes I stayed like that, and I was sensing he was becoming increasingly wobbly.
“By this point, the other two people who’d first seen the man called for police and the ambulance.
“They got there quickly, and at around 10.30 we all helped get the man into the ambulance where he was transported to the James Paget Hospital.
“He was holding my hand the whole time, thanking me, telling me I’d saved his life.”
“You can’t really prepare for these things until they hit you – but I knew what I was doing because of my first aid training.
“Without that, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to approach the man in the first place, or have known what to do once I did.”
According to police, the injuries the man sustained were not “life-changing”.
Adam Harding, director of the site’s security company, Phoenix Events, said: “I’m so proud of Chris for what he did that night.
“He’d have been well within his rights to call the ambulance and wait for them to arrive. But he didn’t. He saved a man’s life.”
