Virginia Dad Crushed by Car Saved by Daughter

Aug. 01--HENRICO, Va. -- When he was safe and recovering in the hospital Sunday, his life pulled from the brink, Alec Kornacki was too choked up to talk, to speak his first words to the daughter who had saved him.

"He was on the phone to me from the hospital but Mom had to take over. She said he started to cry and just couldn't get the words out," Lauren Kornacki recalled Tuesday.

For the 52-year-old Alec, an energetic triathlete, football referee and businessman, life nearly came to an abrupt stop Saturday evening but for the intervention of 22-year-old Lauren, who discovered him not breathing and pinned in the garage beneath a car that had slipped from a jack.

"He wasn't breathing. His heart was stopped," Lauren said. "His arm was pinned to his chest by the car."

Lauren, who graduated in May from the University of Mary Washington, said the sight of "the most important person" in her life nearly took her own breath away. But not her presence of mind.

A shove against the car, tipped unevenly like a four-legged table with a short leg, was enough to relieve the pressure. She pulled her 210-pound, unconscious father from beneath the BMW.

"He's been on a diet," said Lauren, who described her family as devout, prayerful and deeply involved in one another's lives and work at St. Michael's Catholic Church.

"We still pray at dinner together," Lauren said. Alec, a senior business systems analyst at Capital One, is a hard-charging, giving person "who has never stopped working for our family. I'm so proud to be able to say he's my dad."

Lauren employed CPR techniques that she'd gotten refresher training in as part of a summer lifeguard gig. That job has now given way to assessing solar efficiencies in a model home operated by James River Air Conditioning.

"I can't begin to say how important that training is; that's one of the reasons I want people to know what happened. It saved my dad's life. Losing him for me was not an option, and I just wasn't going to allow it.

"I wouldn't let anyone else touch him until the paramedics arrived," she said.

Lauren had completed three sets of compressions and two sets of mouth-to-mouth when emergency help arrived. That was enough to get her father's first breaths restored.

"The fire station is right across the street from our house (in western Henrico County), and they know us pretty well," Lauren said. "My dog keeps going over there."

And before her dad was loaded into the ambulance for the trip to the hospital, "there was already a prayer circle getting started in the driveway," Lauren said.

Now "there's enough food from friends and neighbors to last us every day for weeks," and the recovery process to heal the broken ribs and the pain is proceeding well.

"We think he'll be out of the ICU in the next few days, and we want to get him home as soon as we can," Lauren said of the family. The incident happened the day after her parents' 27th wedding anniversary. The couple grew up together a mile apart in Dale City in Northern Virginia.

Soon it will be back to the dinner table together and a family prayer of thanksgiving.

"And there's no way we're letting my father back in the garage," Lauren added.

bmckelway@timesdispatch.com (804) 649-6601

Copyright 2012 - Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.