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Rick Harper didn’t expect to be a hero when he drove on Lake Shore Blvd. Thursday morning and helped save a woman from a burning crash.

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On his route, a Tesla had crashed into a guardrail and then driven into a concrete pillar, causing the vehicle to catch fire near Cherry St.

The vehicle had five passengers.

Harper stopped to help with his fire extinguisher.

“But as soon as I got out of the truck, they were yelling, you know, that they needed a bar or something to break the window because they were basically banging on the window with their hands, and it wasn’t going anywhere,” Harper recounted CTV News on Friday. “So I took the rod out of the truck I had.”

Harper and another Good Samaritan smashed the vehicle’s rear window.

“(I) took a few swings at the window, and I passed the bar to the guy next to me, and he took a few swings, and then the window came out. And then (it) was good to see the young lady come out head first through the window,” Harper recalled.

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The woman, 25, was taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

He did not know there were other passengers and the woman did not provide any information.

“There was panic in her eyes. Nobody asked her anything. She probably wouldn’t be able to talk,” he said. “We just assumed it was a driver who was trapped, and without fire equipment, we couldn’t do anything for the driver.”

Harper said he looked inside the vehicle, but it was dark and he didn’t see any other passengers.

But he remembers hearing a “tiny voice” that “let out a scream.”

“It was so subdued and so quiet and so weak,” he said. “That’s what hurts, hearing a voice and then finding out later, a few hours later, people were in that car and nobody knew. Nobody knew until the fire was out.

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A 26-year-old man, 29-year-old man, 32-year-old man and a 30-year-old woman died in the crash.

“If we had known there was someone else, we would have tried to crawl into the window or grab someone else, but it was dark inside the car. You couldn’t see in there,” he said, adding that he feared there might be an explosion.

“I had to get it out of there. I didn’t know if the battery was going to explode and, you know, cause a big fire with all the equipment around there,” Harper said. “I just kept going after I did everything I could do.”

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