Deputy stops car after driver has seizure in school zone

By Mike Morris

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A quick-thinking sheriff’s deputy was able to get a car stopped without any children being injured Wednesday after a Fayette County motorist suffered a seizure in a school zone.

Fayette sheriff’s Capt. David Moorman told the AJC that Deputy Tom Mindar was directing traffic outside Whitewater Middle School on Ga. 85 around 8 a.m. when he motioned for an approaching vehicle to stop.

“The vehicle wasn’t stopping, although traveling at slow speed, and continued to approach him,” Moorman said.

“Deputy Mindar noticed there was some type of medical emergency or that the driver was in some type of duress at the time,” he said.

As the car passed Mindar, the deputy “grabbed the door handle and pulled the door open and attempted to bring the vehicle to a stop,” Moorman said. “Come to find out, after he did get the vehicle stopped, that the driver was having a seizure.”

Mindar was treated for an injury to his right leg that he suffered getting into the vehicle to get his foot on the brake, Moorman said. Both Mindar and the 67-year-old Brooks man who suffered the seizure “will be all right,” Moorman said.

He said there were schoolchildren in the immediate area when the incident occurred, but none were injured because Mindar “managed to get the car stopped while still in the lane of traffic.”

Loraine Eidson was driving a school bus loaded with Whitewater High School students, and had stopped in front of the middle school while Mindar let cars turn out of the middle school onto Ga. 85. Suddenly, Eidson said, a northbound car was headed straight for her bus.

"It didn't take him but a split second to realize something was wrong," Eidson said of the deputy.

"He started chasing the car and he opened the car door and steered the car away from my bus and brought the car to a stop before anything happened," Eidson said. "I still don't know how he did it, how he could think that fast. "