Virginia Deputy Single-Handedly Saves Woman Pinned Under Overturned Vehicle

A Virginia sheriff’s department is honoring an officer for his heroic save of a woman trapped beneath an overturned vehicle following a horrific vehicle accident.

Deputy Jon Holt responded to a May 7 call. Upon arriving at the scene, his body camera—released by the department May 18— revealed the overturned car lying on the side of the road.

“The driver was laying underneath the vehicle with her head pinned by the sunroof,” reads the Gloucester sheriff’s department Facebook post commending Holt’s response. “Seeing the trauma her child was witnessing, Deputy J. Holt went into overdrive.”

Approaching the vehicle, a bystander yelled, “She can’t breathe!”

“Through sheer will and determination,” to not let the mom “succumb to her circumstance in front of her panic-stricken child,” Holt called the child to him, and once safely out of harm’s way, took to rescuing the mom.

“Mommy!” the child cried as Holt used his sheer man power to lift the vehicle just high enough for the trapped woman to “maneuver her head out to safety.”

Just before the body cam footage goes black, Holt can be heard asking the woman, “Is your head clear?”

Holt told reporters he must have had a guardian angel watching over him.

“I tried to lift the vehicle one time and said, ‘I can’t do it,'” he said in the weeks following the accident. “I reverted back to my military training and that’s something that’s unacceptable, so I put my shoulder into the door frame, braced up and said, ‘All I have to do is just stand up.’ That’s what I just kept telling myself. I don’t know if it was adrenaline, sheer will, but I knew what I had to do.”

“It’s what we do,” continued Holt. “It’s what we train for and I’m no hero. I’m just an average cop that gets put in extraordinary situations.”

This heroic action comes three months after being designated the “Top Cop” award in his department for his rescue in a structure fire in 2020.