Hudson News Associate is a Life-Saver

A Hudson News associate in Richmond International Airport found a unique way to celebrate Hudson’s “Year of the Customer” – by taking part in saving a customer’s life. Here is how the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported the story on January 27, 2010:

Scott McKee and Kayla Cagwin embraced like long-lost friends, which was noteworthy because they'd met only once before and McKee doesn't remember it because he was pretty much dead.

"I'm really glad to see you're OK," Cagwin said as they hugged in the atrium of the main terminal at Richmond International Airport on Monday afternoon.

McKee thanked her, marveled at her youthfulness and presented her with a bottle of champagne -- after making sure she was of legal age. She's 22.

Cagwin insisted that she wasn't alone in what she did, and that's very true, as you'll see, but as Capt. Bill Sheets of the airport's fire department, who also was involved, said, "She was the first one there. She took action. Had she not, we may have had different results." Meaning McKee wouldn't have been around to hug anybody.

McKee, 52, was at the airport Dec. 12 to meet his sister, who was flying in from Rochester, N.Y., for a holiday visit. McKee, who lives in Fredericksburg, is a sculptor and conservator of fine art and historic monuments, such as those along Monument Avenue. As an aside, he has spent much of the past five years reconstructing an exquisite 19th-century, white-marble Indian pavilion that he and his partners are in the process of installing at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

He'd gone up the escalator into the atrium, near the security checkpoint for Concourse B, when he noticed the lights for Hudson News, a shop selling newspapers and magazines, snacks, and souvenirs.

"The lights went from white to red to black," recalled McKee, who had no chest pains to foreshadow the heart attack he was having. "My last thought was, 'I can't handle this.' I knew I was dropping."

Business was slow at Hudson News, where Cagwin was working, and she had just mentioned to someone how boring Saturdays can be when she looked up from the sales counter to see McKee collapse.

She instinctively raced to McKee, maybe 20 yards away, and checked for breathing and a pulse. She found neither. He was, as Sheets would say later, "gone," and the race was on not only to save him but to revive him before he suffered irreversible brain damage.

Cagwin opened the glass door to a defibrillator on the wall just above where McKee fell. She had no training in using a defibrillator and knew cardiopulmonary resuscitation only from what she learned in high school gym class, but, she said, "I just knew I had to do something."

She was joined by a woman on her way to catch a flight who said she worked in sports medicine, and the two of them followed the instructions on the defibrillator to apply the first shocks to McKee's heart. Another man stopped and began doing chest compressions. Several other passers-by stopped and helped.

Within a couple of minutes, several of the airport's rescue workers -- who happened to be downstairs and not in the firehouse a half-mile away because they were returning chairs and tables they had borrowed for a Christmas party -- arrived and took over. They shocked McKee's heart three more times, continued to do vigorous chest compressions -- McKee still has the sore ribs to prove it -- and his pulse returned.

Meanwhile, McKee's sister, Emily Dimon, showed up, saw a crowd gathered around a person receiving emergency medical attention and felt "really awful" that someone was in such bad shape. She made her way past the scene, which she remembers as eerily quiet, and went to claim her baggage and find McKee. When she called his cell phone, a police officer returned the call and gave her the news.

McKee, of course, remembers none of it. After blacking out, his next memory is of a shining white light, although it's not what you might think. It was the dome light in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. He was going to be OK.

"I never thought I'd be able to react that way in a situation like that, but now I know I can do it," said Kayla Cagwin.