Doing Good

It was a beautiful morning in late January: temperatures were in the low 60s with the morning sun coming out after a night of rain. My husband, Cole Thomson, was coming back from one of his early-morning bike rides – 30 miles to, from, and around Memorial Park. He was feeling great.

Then, the back tire on his bicycle blew out.

When he landed on the pavement, in intense pain and unable to move, he knew this was not an ordinary fall. 

Alana Bethea, driving to work that morning, hadn’t seen Cole fall but did see him on the ground. “He’s going to get hit by a car,” she thought. She pulled her car around and stopped.

Two other women stopped, too. They alerted Jessica Moghaddam, who was in her nearby restaurant and coffee bar, Burger Vibe/LaVita Coffee. Jessica brought out traffic cones. They all began to direct traffic around Cole. “That is a super accident-prone corner, and it was busy at rush hour,” says Jessica. Cole, she says, must have been terrified.

They called 911.

Alana, the first person to stop, stayed with Cole, even offering to follow him to the hospital so he wouldn’t be alone. She kept his bike for safe keeping and exchanged contact information with him. She picked his cell phone off the pavement and handed it to him as he was being put in the ambulance.

“I just feel such enormous gratitude to everyone who stopped and everyone who helped me, including the EMTs and the hospital staff,” says Cole.

He had broken his femur or thigh bone. Breaking your femur, the largest, strongest, and heaviest bone in your body, is extremely painful. (He required immediate surgery, but is now, months later, fully recovered and back on his bike.)

“I went from everything being great to being absolutely helpless in a split second,” Cole remembers. 

The thing he was most aware of and comforted by that morning was Alana staying with him and holding his hand.

Once in the ambulance, Cole remembers sheepishly, he even asked the burly EMT taking care of him to hold his hand. The man did.

What Alana and the others who stopped and helped did is called being a Good Samaritan, something human beings have been doing since the dawn of the species. Its name, after all, comes from the 2,000+ year old Biblical story. Researchers call it a type of “pro-social behavior,” a voluntary act meant to help someone else, and speculate that such empathetic behavior has helped human beings to thrive.

BACK ON THE BIKE Cole Thomson has fully recovered and is back cycling.

Human beings have always contemplated the act of being a Good Samaritan, wondering who stops to help, under what conditions, and why. Even in the original Biblical parable, told in the Gospel of Luke, the Good Samaritan, literally a man from Samaria, was the only one who stopped upon coming across a man who had been robbed, beaten, and left for dead. At the time, the men were technically enemies, but the Samaritan stopped to help anyway. 

In a famous study in 1973, “From Jerusalem to Jericho,” named after the stretch of road the victim in the Good Samaritan story was on, social psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson did an experiment involving 67 students from the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. First, the students met with a researcher and filled out surveys. They were then told they needed to prepare a short presentation to give to a group in another building nearby. Some of the participants were told the subject of their presentation was the story of the Good Samaritan; others were given unrelated subjects. When the participants were finally told to go to the other building to give their presentations, some were told they had plenty of time to get there, some were told they would be right on time if they left now, and some were told that they were already late and should hurry. Meanwhile, an actor lay in wait, in the doorway of the building they needed to enter, acting distressed and ill.

A full 60 percent of the participants did not stop to help. Some, ones who were told they were late, even stepped right over the person who looked to be in distress. That’s a dispiriting result. The ones who had just been preparing a talk on the Good Samaritan were no more likely to stop than the others. But there was nuance in the results: 63 percent of the people who thought they had plenty of time to get to where they were going did stop, compared to only 10 percent of the ones who thought they were late.

Another real-life event seemed to point out how bad human beings are at helping one another: the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, N.Y. A front-page story in The New York Times at the time said that almost 40 people heard Kitty Genovese screaming that night as she was chased and repeatedly stabbed, but none of them called for help. This shocked the nation and led researchers, including John Darley of the later Princeton study, to coin the terms “bystander effect” or “bystander apathy” for the idea that individuals are less likely to stop and help someone when other people are present. But the story, now the subject of many articles, books, documentaries, and psychology textbooks, turned out to be different and more complex than what was originally believed. Multiple people did call the police. Many who did not call the police heard some yelling and assumed it was a quarrel amongst patrons leaving a nearby bar at closing time. A 70-year-old woman from Kitty’s apartment building, who had called the police, came out, even though she had no way to know where the attacker was, and cradled Genovese in her arms until the ambulance came.

Local police and firefighters here in Houston say people do want to help. “People are really good about calling things in,” says Ray Schultz, chief of police at the Memorial Villages Police Department. If there’s an accident on the freeway in his area, he says, his department may get 50-60 calls about it. “Remember: you’re being a Good Samaritan just by making that phone call,” he says.

Police and firefighters say do make that phone call, even to 911. While neighborhood police departments have their own numbers, of course, it’s not always clear which neighborhood boundaries you are in. While it’s a good idea to have local police and fire department numbers saved in your phone, 911 always works. “If it isn’t an emergency, the dispatcher will just quickly ask you to call on the nonemergency line,” says Onesimo Lopez, chief of police at the Bellaire Police Department. You will not be tying up the line for real emergencies.

Even as you are stopping to help, says Chief Schultz, call and “start that 911 clock.”

Jeff Mraz, A-shift captain at the West University Place Fire Department, thinks people may hesitate to help because they worry they might inadvertently cause harm and even be sued. “If people had a good understanding of the law, they’d have less hesitation about helping,” he says. Texas, like every other U.S. state, has a “Good Samaritan Law.” Basically, if you try to help someone in an emergency situation in a reasonable way and in good faith, you are protected from civil liability if, for instance, the cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, you performed on them breaks their ribs (which is known to happen). These laws were passed in order to encourage people to help those in distress.

“People have a desire to help, and we definitely want to encourage people to help others when they can, but – and there’s always a ‘but,’” says Chief Lopez of Bellaire, “common sense needs to prevail.” If, for instance, you are stopping for a car accident or a stalled car, he says, “keep in mind that you are not as visible as a police car or a person in a visibility vest is. Pull well off the roadway and put your flashers on.”

All the police interviewed advised that if someone is behaving erratically or people are involved in an argument, do not intervene yourself. Call the police. In those cases, focus on being “the best witness you can be,” says Officer Katie Wilson of the City of West University Place Police Department, “without putting yourself in harm’s way.”

There are so many ways, big and small, that people can be Good Samaritans, though, and if we think about it, we have all been there, both as the helper and as the person helped. We turn in a lost wallet. We catch a loose dog and try to find her owner. Like Alana, Jessica, and the two young women who stopped when Cole had his accident, we render aid to someone who is hurt or ill and call for help. We scoop up an injured or orphaned wild animal and bring them to the Houston SPCA’s or the Houston Humane Society’s wildlife centers. We stop for someone with car trouble. We check on neighbors after a hurricane or bad storm. We comfort a lost child and help to reunite them with their parents.

For Cole, that was the silver lining in his accident. “It reminded me that people are good,” he says.