Bargersville police officers rescue woman from burning car

The Bargersville Police Department is praising two of its officers for taking quick action to save a woman trapped inside a burning car.

According to a BPD police report, a woman drove off an access road Friday just east of Interstate 69 in Greenwood. She crashed into a fence and could not escape her car, which had caught fire, until Officers Cody St. John and Joshua Wheat came to her rescue.

In the officers’ body camera footage, you can hear the faint sound of sirens as they approached the scene.

“Upon arrival, we saw the car had actually gone about a hundred feet off the roadway,” Ofc. Wheat recalled. “I walked up right behind him, same time. [I] saw that our victim was in the car, and we just did our job from there on out.”

The police report describes the site as “a severe curve section of roadway that isn’t properly marked.” A witness who called 911 estimated the car was going 80 miles per hour when it crashed.

“Due to the impact, she really didn’t have a way out,” Wheat said. “There was a fence line on her driver’s side door.”

Footage from St. John’s body camera captured him encouraging the hesitant driver to exit, despite injuries to her legs and cuts from glass.

“Come on,” St. John can be heard saying.

“I’m trying. I hit both of my knees and my ankle,” the driver responded.

“You’re almost there, you’re almost there,” St. John said.

“He [St. John] wasn’t in his normal Tesla, he was in a pool car. He didn’t have a fire extinguisher. So I grabbed mine,” Wheat recalled.

As St. John worked to bring the driver to safety, Wheat began extinguishing the fire.

“You can clearly see in that video that she’s very happy and just grateful for not only us officers, but that she was able to walk away from that,” Wheat said.