LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - An Arkansas Boy Scout leader has been honored with the organization’s highest valor award for single-handedly guiding to safety a confused motorist who was barreling down the wrong way on busy Interstate 40.
Barry Bray, scoutmaster of Troop 12 at Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church in Little Rock, is credited with maneuvering ahead of the other motorist and forcing him to stop on Jan. 30, 2012.
The driver turned out to be a 90-year-old widower who had gotten disoriented on the way to a doctor’s appointment and hadn’t realized he turned onto the interstate in the wrong direction. Bray eventually escorted the man to his appointment.
Bray’s actions likely saved the motorist and fellow travelers from serious injury or death.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports (https://bit.ly/1flHZCq ) that Bray, 55, was formally presented with the Honor Medal With Crossed Palms on Friday night at the Quapaw Area Council’s annual awards banquet in North Little Rock. The council serves more than 10,000 Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and Venturers in 39 counties in Arkansas.
The medal is rarely conferred, with fewer than 300 recipients nationwide since the medals recognition program was redesigned and renamed in 1923.
Bill Price, program director for the council in Little Rock, said no one from the council has received the award in his 18 years with the group. But the committee that considered the circumstances leading to Bray’s recognition had no hesitation in forwarding a recommendation that Bray was a worthy candidate for the medal, he added.
“This was not just helping an old lady across the street,” Price said. “What he did was put his life in danger to save someone else’s life or keep a bigger catastrophe from happening.”
The incident occurred on I-40 just west of Russellville. Bray, on a trip from Little Rock to Rogers, noticed cars in the eastbound lanes swerving and honking their horns in reaction to a vehicle traveling the wrong way in the fast lane.
“I attempted to warn oncoming traffic and get his attention by honking, waving my arms and flashing my lights,” he said in a written account of the incident. “I crossed the median, but the freeway was splitting into two bridges so I got back onto the (westbound) lanes.”
At one point, two tractor-trailers were approaching the errant motorist, “but to my shock, he popped out the other side unscathed.”
Bray, driving a pickup, entered the median again and pulled alongside the smaller vehicle, “but to my dismay he wouldn’t pull over.”
Bray said he was “screaming with my window down, flashing my lights at oncoming traffic and he still is oblivious to what’s going on so I pulled in front of him . and began braking to slow him down.”
___
Information from: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, https://www.arkansasonline.com
Please read our comment policy before commenting.