A teenager is being hailed as a hero after he stopped his bike ride to help a 75-year-old woman he found wandering alone in 103-degree heat.
Royal Cothrun, 14, was riding through his Gilbert, Arizona neighborhood when he noticed something wasn’t right with a woman standing nearby.
“I don’t even know, she just looked like something was wrong, so I started talking to her,” Cothrun told KOLD News 13.
The woman, Teresa Morgan, 75, had recently been diagnosed with dementia. She had become disoriented after visiting a nearby grocery store and wandered miles from her house, unknowingly walking into some of the hottest hours of an Arizona summer day.
“I knew it was hot. She was sweating,” Cothrun said.
Instead of riding on, Cothrun stayed with her, walked her into the shade, and worked to calm her down. Slowly, he was able to get Morgan to recall her son Jeff’s phone number.
Jeff Morgan raced to the scene within minutes, arriving before Gilbert Fire Department crews got there.
“It’s incredible really, what he did,” Jeff Morgan told KOLD News 13. “Just so lucky, so fortunate that he ran across her and he cared enough to stay with her and to take care of her.”
A Gilbert firefighter who responded to the scene said the outcome could have gone very differently.
“The outcome could have been, would have been much, much worse had he not done what he did,” the firefighter said.
Cothrun wore a pair of recording sunglasses during the encounter, which captured portions of the moment as it unfolded and helped confirm the timeline for responders. His mother said his instinct to stop wasn’t unusual for her son.
“Super proud, obviously he was calm. He was compassionate,” she told KOLD News 13.
Cothrun is being formally recognized by both the Gilbert Fire Department and the Air National Guard. The family he helped has already settled on their own title for him: A hero.
