MOORE, Okla. – Several weeks ago our In Your Corner team was on assignment in Moore.
They were hot on the trail of scammers, when something else caught their attention.
Jeremy Boggess was grabbing lunch from the Red Cross when out of nowhere, something happened that lifted his broken spirits.
“I’ve been praying about it,” Jeremy said.
A group from Tuscaloosa was giving away gift cards.
“Even though we’re 633 miles away, we still know what you’ve been through,” Michael Cordell, Nucor Steel Tuscaloosa employee said. “We know the struggles you have ahead of you. It’s about being good neighbors.”
Few are more deserving than Jeremy.
He’s a survivor in every sense of the word.
Jeremy lives with kidney disease and a bad heart.
“I was born with it,” Jeremy said. “My mom died of it. She was 27.”
A year later his dad committed suicide.
Jeremy refuses to let past tragedies define him.
May 20th is no different.
Still the images haunt him.
Jeremy says he was running up and down several streets, frantically searching for survivors, when suddenly his focus turned to one home.
“I had the strength of 100 men,” Jeremy said. “[I] ripped a door off its hinges, carried a man an eighth of a mile. It was all instinctual.”
Jeremy had help from a rookie paramedic.
“The paramedic looked at me and said, ‘We need to take this man to Moore Medical Center. Where’s Moore Medical Center?’,” Jeremy said. “I turned around and pointed. I said, ‘That’s Moore Medical Center, brotha.’ It was gone.”
Yet hope for the wounded stranger didn’t fade.
“He [was] still aware, but they couldn’t find a pulse on his legs. They were blue,” Jeremy said. “There wasn’t even any blood coming out because he had lost so much blood.”
Jeremy wonders whatever happened to that man.
Life goes on and so do Jeremy’s struggles.
He’s too sick to work full-time and too broke to pay for repairs to his SUV.
We left Jeremy and returned several weeks later to check on him. We weren’t empty handed.
We hand delivered an anonymous cash donation to Jeremy. It wasn’t just any gift, but a check for $1,500.
“Man, you don’t understand the pain I was in last night,” Jeremy said. “I really didn’t expect you guys to show up at all.”
It’s momentum for a guy weathering a lifetime of storms.
A special thanks to our friends in Tuscaloosa.
In all, Nucor Steel, Bryant Bank and others handed out more than 400 gift cards to Oklahoma tornado victims.
