Oct. 21 was supposed to be the start of an average weekend for Pemberton local Lennox Davies. Instead, he ended up saving his close friend’s life.
Davies, an 18-year-old communications and kinesiology student at Capilano University, was packing up to visit home that day when his phone rang. It was a call from Oliver Richman, whom he’d known since “before he can remember.” The young men grew up skiing and playing soccer together, so when Richman invited Davies to his New Westminster home for the night, Davies changed plans and headed south 10 minutes before he was supposed to drive north for the weekend.
You can call it chance, the will of God or anything else you want. The fact is, Davies was in the right place at the moment Richman needed him most.
The longtime friends played video games deep into the night, as many young men are known to do. Davies was mildly annoyed at losing a game of FIFA and suggested they watch TV instead. Richman hopped onto his bed to do so, and Davies heard something hit the wall. At first, he assumed it was the game controller, or perhaps Richman had smacked his head by mistake.
Then Richman started snoring—but doing so very unusually. Davies describes it as “cartoon snoring.”
“I stood up and tried to talk to him, and there was no response at all,” Davies recalled. “He didn’t respond to touch, didn’t respond to sound. That’s when I kind of realized, oh sh**, this is not good.”
In truth, Richman was experiencing ventricular tachycardia: an abnormal condition where the heart’s lower chamber beats too fast to pump efficiently, leaving the body deprived of oxygenated blood. Sustained ventricular tachycardia can lead to cardiac arrest—which was exactly what Richman had just gone into.
“I just remember trying to think and not being able to,” Davies said. “I was trying to be like, OK, what can I do here? What are my options? But I just felt like I was completely clouded.”
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
It had been three years since Davies was trained in CPR as part of the outdoor program at Pemberton Secondary School. He never thought he would have to use it on a fellow 18-year-old, a close friend. Yet with Richman unconscious in front of him, adrenaline cleared the clouds and launched Davies into action.
His training and instincts proved sound. Davies forklifted Richman out of his bed and lowered him to the ground, ensuring he was flat on his back to clear his airway. The kinesiology student dialed 911 and then put his head down, doing chest compressions for about 15 minutes. By Davies’ estimation, Richman briefly gasped for air about four minutes in. He gasped again roughly six minutes after that.
At this point, it was about 2 a.m. on Oct. 22. First responders had arrived and were asking Davies if the front door was unlocked. He knew it wasn’t. The 911 operator advised Davies to move the next time Richman gasped.
“I don’t think I’ve ever run that fast in my life,” the Capilano student said of the moment he bolted to open the door.
Exhausted from doing chest compressions, Davies could only scream raggedly to guide paramedics to Richman’s location in the house. He promptly allowed them to take over as a tidal wave of relief mixed with trepidation flooded him. Doubt infiltrated his mind as he sat just outside the room, listening to the first responders work: “no heartbeat, no pulse.”
“There was so much adrenaline and so much emotion going through me that it was so difficult to speak,” Davies recalls.
He lifted his head when the paramedics reported a pulse from Richman. When he separated his hands, something splashed to the floor. At first, Davies wondered if he was bleeding for some reason. He wasn’t.
So, what had dampened the floor? It was the tears that had pooled in his hands.
When first responders asked Davies if he was OK, he said yes—because compared to Richman at that time, he was. They departed for the hospital, and he called his mom, knowing for sure that he needed someone to talk to, someone to give him a second opinion. Davies felt that he couldn’t stay in Richman’s empty house anymore, which was so quiet that “you could hear a pin drop on carpet.”
Instead, he called an Uber and went to the hospital, bringing with him Richman’s wallet, phone charger, shoes and clothing. Davies wanted to be there for his friend.
‘COMPLETE JOY’
Only Richman’s immediate family members were allowed into his room, so Davies waited outside, trying to field questions from hospital staff as nightmarish what-if scenarios hijacked his train of thought. At first, he struggled to calm down, but spending hours on the phone with his own parents and Richman’s father, Mike, seemed to help him focus.
When Mike, the mayor of Pemberton, arrived, Davies immediately pointed him towards the front desk. “The lady there will know where your son is,” he remembers saying. “Go to Oliver. Go to Oliver.”
Mike rushed off, and Davies hoped with all of his soul that he would return bearing good news. Fortunately, that’s what happened. Oliver Richman would be OK, and Davies felt like he was “able to breathe again.”
“I remember letting out a breath of air and I was like, OK. I just saved his life,” Davies said. “He’s alive because of me. And as soon as I walked out of that hospital, I was just like, crying out of complete joy and complete happiness.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt that happy in my life. I don’t think I ever will again.”
Mike Richman offered to drive Davies back to Pemberton, but he declined, encouraging his friend’s father to stay at Oliver’s bedside. Instead, Davies called another Uber to reach his grandparents’ house, talking with his mom while he waited. His adrenaline rush didn’t seem to subside until Oct. 23, when he was driving back to Pemberton and alone with his thoughts on the Sea to Sky highway.
Davies feared that others in his community would bombard him with questions about the incident, but he credits Richman’s mother, Tanya, with helping him stay largely anonymous. When some mutual friends inevitably put two and two together, he admitted to his involvement but requested privacy to process his emotions.
So why has Davies now chosen to tell his story? He understands that other people have been in his situation before, and others still may be placed there in the future. He realizes that had he not paid attention to his high school CPR training, the outcome of this story could be much different.
Davies hopes that many others will pursue first aid training and take it seriously, not just so they gain potentially life-saving skills, but also so they can learn to deal with the bleak hypotheticals that plague one’s mind during a stressful situation.
“If I can put out a good example of what to do and how to act in those situations, maybe it can save somebody else’s life,” Davies said. “The fact is, the what-ifs are always going to be worse than the situation at hand [and] they distract you from what’s really happening. That’s the main thing for me: giving people as much information as I can to help them in a situation where they might need it. You never know when they’re going to cross that bridge.”
Richman, as of this writing, feels well and is getting back into everyday life after having his stitches removed. He is coaching basketball at Pemberton Secondary School as he awaits the next checkup, which will hopefully clear him for full exercise. A resilient young man, Richman looks forward to getting over what he calls a “speed bump” so he can get back to studying sport sciences at Douglas College.
Above all, he is grateful that his relationship with Davies has become even stronger.
“Once we went to university, we didn’t hang out for about two months until I asked him to hang out on the night where it all happened,” Richman said. “This has definitely brought us closer and created a lifelong friendship.”
