Sept. 17--UIC police Officer Mike Mesce was on patrol along Roosevelt Road on the West Side when he heard a woman screaming in pain, "Stop! Stop!"
Mesce looked to his left and saw a woman being dragged by a slow-moving semi, her legs pinned under the rear wheels and her arms flailing.
"It was shocking," he said. "You have to respond to it."
Mesce immediately made a U-turn and flashed his lights, signaling the truck to stop.
"It was really frantic, and I had no idea the condition she would be in once I actually got the truck stopped," said Mesce, who works for the University of Illinois at Chicago.
"Even just getting out of my car and rushing to her lying on the ground, I had no real idea of the extent of the injuries," he said Wednesday. "I just tried to keep her as calm as possible and be as clear on the radio to get medical assistance to her as fast as possible."
A UIC emergency medical services team arrived soon and applied a tourniquet to the 22-year-old woman's upper left leg before paramedics arrived and took her to Stroger Hospital in critical condition.
"Preliminarily, it appeared that the truck was turning from northbound Ashland to eastbound Roosevelt," Mesce said. Police were reviewing video from a nearby gas station and were interviewing witnesses, he said.
The driver, Said Shire, 42, of Columbus, Ohio, was cited for driving on the sidewalk or parkway and failure to reduce speed to avoid an accident, police said. He was expected in traffic court at 10 a.m. Oct. 13.
"I'm glad I was there when I was," Mesce said. "It's definitely possible that things could have turned out a lot worse. It's kind of impossible to predict how it would have went had I not been there. But I'm definitely glad that I was able to give the help that I did."
Mesce said the experience was "rewarding" and he hopes the woman has a "fast and short recovery."
"I've been a police officer for five years and you go to a lot of calls where you're the bad guy, giving someone a ticket, or arresting someone, or something mundane like breaking up someone's party, and you're being seen as the bad guy or the ruiner," Mesce said. "To be the complete opposite of that is really cool."
Chicago Tribune's Alexandra Chachkevitch contributed.
