“When I heard a woman talking from inside my pocket, I just started shouting,” Sam Ray said. “I didn’t know if she could hear me or not, but I heard her say that help was just around the corner.”
Christina Lee, Rutherford County dispatcher, said she initially thought Ray’s call was an accidental butt-dial. “We get a lot of pocket dials, and I thought it was a pocket dial at first. But then I heard the screams for help.”
Lee used the signal from Ray’s smartphone to locate him, but it didn’t pin the exact address. She said Ray yelling his address “was the best thing he could have done.”
After being trapped under the truck for 40 minutes, a volunteer firefighter elevated the truck with a jack. Ray was airlifted to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, which is about 40 miles away from where he was. He suffered three broken ribs, a bruised kidney, and second- and third-degree burns to one of his arms stuck under the truck’s exhaust pipe.
Ray said he was considering switching to a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, but his life-saving experience with Siri changed his mind.
“I guess I’m stuck with an iPhone for the rest of my life,” he said. “I owe them that.”
