"Not all teenagers would have reacted like that": near Lyon, he saves his bus driver from a heart attack

"We are very proud of our son but he made a normal gesture, a civic gesture of good manners." For a month, Axel Fournier and his parents have been telling the story of how the teenager's behavior helped save his bus driver. A few minutes of clairvoyance that earned him the recognition of his entire high school and even a medal from the city of Thizy-les-Bourgs (Rhône) where he attends school, west of Lyon .

It was a little after 5pm, in the biting cold of the Rhone countryside on Tuesday, January 14, when Axel returned to his bus stop. As usual, he had left his private high school Sainte-Thérèse to return to the family home in Montagny (Loire), on the other side of the departmental border. But this time, the bus had broken down and the driver, whom he usually meets, was also in a bad way.

"He went out to check the bus battery and when he came back he was breathing heavily ," Axel said. "He started holding on to the bus and then sitting on the steps. At first I didn't really know what to do, but then he called his manager back and said he felt bad." Axel then picked up his phone and called the fire department.

Connected with the emergency services, he followed the instructions given to him for about twenty minutes until the firefighters arrived. "It was endless," he says today. The emergency services explained to him that the driver was having a heart attack, before airlifting him to the cardiology hospital in Bron.

"He was the only passenger on the bus and had no one to rely on but himself ," says the mayor of Thizy-les-Bourgs, Ludovic Cherpin (PS). "He did the right thing, the right reflex, called for help and did what the emergency services said. It's a remarkable act of citizenship! So many people walk past without doing anything." With his classmates, he had been trained in first aid at elementary school and middle school within the Sainte-Thérèse group, assures his director Madely Kane.

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"He often says that he wasn't a hero, but he was there at the right time ," she continues. "Not all children his age would have behaved like that." She asked for a medal from the academy in recognition of his gesture. One more, the young man having already received one from the city. "He's a different student, in kindness, who does quite well academically, whose path we are lucky to cross," continues Madely Kane.

Yet, he could have never crossed paths with his driver on that Tuesday in January. "As we live in the Loire, the bus was not supposed to serve our stop initially," recalls Axel's mother.