Canadian paramedic Jayme Erickson was first to attend the Nov. 15 crash north of Calgary in which the passenger was trapped inside the vehicle with severe injuries. What she didn’t know at the time, because of the severity of the injuries to the victim, was that she had just treated her 17-year-old daughter, Montana.
She sat in the car with her and tended to the trapped woman until further medical teams arrived.
“Jayme unknowingly was keeping her own daughter alive,” Richard Reed, a paramedic and friend of Erickson, explained in a press conference Wednesday. He added that Erickson administered the medical treatment to buy the victim’s family time to say goodbye.
It wasn’t until Erickson returned home that she was met by Canadian police — and the devastating news of her daughter’s death. “She was a fighter and she fought until the day that she died and she was beautiful,” Erickson said during the conference. “She was so beautiful. If she ever put an effort into anything she would always succeed at it.”
“We are overwhelmed with grief and absolutely gutted,” Jayme Erickson added in a GoFundMe page set up by family friend Lindsay Sandalack. “The pain I am feeling is like no pain I have ever felt, it is indescribable.”
“The critically injured patient I had just attended to, was my own flesh and blood. My only child. My mini-me. My daughter, Montana,” she continued. “Her injures [sic] were so horrific I did not even recognize her. I was taken to FMC to see my baby girl, and was informed her injuries were not compatible with life.”
Erickson added that she “cannot help but be angry for the short amount of time I was given with her.” Her emotional post questioned where Montana would be in adulthood — graduated, married, and living a happy life.
“I will cherish the memories we made and the time we had together,” she added. “I am shattered. I am broken. I am missing a piece of me. I am left to pick up the pieces and expected to carry on.”
