Newspaper deliverer aids badly hurt man

A man delivering the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper assisted a badly injured man he found outside of the man’s house in west Little Rock early Friday morning.

Martin Phillips, who has delivered newspapers since 2001, said Friday afternoon that he noticed something moving in a gutter on Clapboard Hill Road in the Sturbridge area while delivering newspapers about 4 a.m. When he saw it was a man with a “significant” head wound, he called 911.

The Little Rock Fire Department and paramedics responded “very quickly,” Phillips said.

The man was lying in water in a gutter in front of his house, Phillips said. The man, a newspaper subscriber Phillips recognized, had a walker and a bottle of medicines next to him, he said.

“He ventured out of his home, I guess, and fell down at the end of his driveway,” Phillips, 51, said. “The guy had a significant head wound. I could see all the way down to his skull. He was laying there in the gutter, and there was still water runoff from the rains previously. He was shivering. I was pretty sure he had gone into shock and was near having hypothermia.”

Phillips said he called his delivery manager to later check on the man, but he hadn’t heard about his condition. A phone number for the subscriber the newspaper has on record wasn’t answered Friday afternoon and no voice-mail box was available.

Phillips said it looked like the man had been lying there injured “for quite some time.”

“His head wound was not even bleeding any more,” he said. “The blood on his face was dried. I’m guessing he had been laying there a couple of hours. He’s never up that early. I go by there at a consistent time every day.

“It was a shock,” Phillips said. “I knew something was really bad wrong when I noticed it was a person there. Everything he had was laying in the gutter in the water with him.”

Phillips said he stayed with the man for about 15 minutes and that firefighters were on the scene “in five minutes” after he called 911.