BATON ROUGE — A mom is counting her blessings after she and her children had a tire blow out in a busy part of Baton Rouge during rush hour. Their rescuer was a young LSU football player, who was just leaving practice.
His actions helped brighten her children’s day and made the woman stop to think about how she hopes she is raising her children to be just as thoughtful and kind as the young college student.
Cayla Crosby Abad tells UWK that she was driving down Burbank Dr. with her young children last week when she unexpectedly had some issues with her car.
Because she recently started providing in-home care as part of her job, she’d stopped driving her large Expedition for something more gas-economic, she said. She was driving an “old beater” on Thursday, the first time her children had gotten to experience the vehicle and they’d been so excited to ride in it.
While driving down Burbank Dr. towards the Bluebonnet Blvd. intersection, Abad suddenly had a tire blow out. She was able to navigate the car to the shoulder, but said she felt unsafe because of the fast-moving traffic after 6 p.m. that day.
Abad tried to loosen the lug nuts on the tire, but struggled. That’s when a young man, Tamarcus Cooley, pulled over and asked if she needed help.
“I was like, ‘Definitely. I would appreciate it so much. So he comes over, and I had been struggling with the lug nuts for probably a good 15 to 20 minutes at that point,” Abad recalled. “He was able to loosen them and get the tire changed.”
Although she didn’t initially know who he was, Abad said the two chatted while Cooley changed the tire. She learned that he was a football player for LSU and had recently left practice for the day.
Cooley, who just moved from North Carolina in January, had been talking to his mom on the phone when he noticed Abad pulled over and attempting to work on her car’s tire. He told Abad that this was one of the reasons he decided to stop and help.
“He said, ‘I was telling (my mom) that I was going to stop, because I would want somebody to stop if it was her.’ And I thought that was so sweet,” Abad told UWK.
She then told Cooley that her kids had been so excited to ride in the car for the first time, and now they were already saying they didn’t want to ride in it anymore.
“The only thing that may help is knowing that it was an LSU football player that stopped to help us, because most of my kids are obsessed with LSU, but especially, like my five-year-old boy,” Abad said.
When she told her kids that Cooley was an LSU football player, her son shouted out “That’s so neat!” Cooley then asked if they wanted to take some photos together.
“It’s probably still over 90 degrees outside, and I just thought that was so nice that he also took the time to come back and get pictures with them,” Abad said.
After taking some selfies, Cooley parted ways with the family, but as he pulled back onto the roadway, he pulled into the lane first and gave Abad room to merge safely, she said.
Abad said she made her Facebook post, not thinking it would gain as much attention as it did, in the hopes that she could share a “feel good story” in the midst of so much negativity.
As a mother, she also stopped to think about how Cooley’s mother might feel with her son being so far from home.
“Despite how much she probably worries about him, I’m sure it’s very reassuring to her to know that this is the kind of man that she raised, and he’s that selfless and that kind,” she said.
Abad has since gotten to speak to Cooley’s mother and told UWK that she shared with her how much respect she has for both her and her son.
Abad shared that her car is in the shop to ensure something like this won’t happen again for a while, and that her kids feel a little better after being saved by an LSU player.
“My oldest was losing his mind right after it first happened, and thankfully, since then, he’s talked a lot more about how Tamarcus had helped us, and that he was a LSU football player,” she laughed.
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