St. Louis Domino’s Delivery Driver Saves Life of 15-Year-Old Boy in ATV Accident

Sept. 24, 2020 was not an average day for Domino’s delivery driver Brandon Eckstein. When 19-year-old Eckstein reported for work, he didn’t anticipate that by the end of the day, he would save the life of a 15-year-old teenager.

Eckstein’s had just completed a pizza delivery and he was driving on some back roads towards the Domino’s store where in worked in Oakville, Missouri.

“I saw that there was an ATV on the side of the road, on its side and it was up against a guardrail,” Eckstein said. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, that’s not normal,’ so I turned around and went back to see if anyone was around it.”

Eckstein didn’t see anyone around the four-wheeler, so he turned around to drive back to the Domino’s store, but something stopped him.

“I had a feeling like I should go back,” he said. “Something just didn’t feel right at all. My body was telling me I had to turn around and go back, so I did.”

And it’s a good thing he did. After driving by the crashed ATV a third time, Eckstein saw a teen who was visibly injured and bleeding, stumbling around the vehicle. He stopped and the boy said that he lived a short distance away in a nearby neighborhood, so Eckstein drove him home to get help.

“As I was driving to his house, I was asking him basic questions – what his name is, how old he is – to see if he had a head injury, even though he was wearing a helmet,” Eckstein said. “He seemed to be in shock. It wasn’t until we got to his house and I helped him get out of the backseat of my car when I realized just how much he was bleeding and how badly he was hurt.”

Eckstein helped the teen to his front door and rang the doorbell. His two younger siblings answered the door, and then his stepmom. As soon as she saw his injury, she became distraught.

“I think the boy was in shock until then too,” Eckstein said. “When he saw his stepmom’s reaction, he looked down at his hand and I think he realized how much pain he was in and he started screaming.”

Eckstein tried to keep them calm, told them to call 911 and get a towel. He sat the boy down on a bench in front of the house, and wrapped his hand in a cloth towel to try and stop the bleeding.

“I was talking to him still, telling him he’d be alright,” Eckstein said. “He was screaming in pain and started to lose consciousness at this point, and I told his stepmom to take the two kids inside because I didn’t want them to see that.”

Eckstein asked for a cold compress for the teen’s forehead and held that there with one hand, while applying pressure to the open wound with his other hand. He continued talking to the young man as he went in and out of consciousness, until his mother, father and paramedics came.

After an ambulance rushed him to the hospital, doctors found that the boy had suffered a concussion, minor compression fractures in four vertebrae, a broken right arm, and multiple broken bones and torn ligaments in his right hand, so bad that he had to undergo reconstructive surgery.

“This delivery driver saved my son’s life,” said Steve Krull, the teen’s father. “He helped my son and kept him alive until the EMTs came. He was awesome. I am a paramedic and firefighter, and what he did was not normal. He knew what he was doing. Maybe he found his calling.”

Eckstein said he took a first aid class in high school, but that he never experienced any situation like this before.

“I think I was just going off instincts,” he said. “This was the first time dealing with anything severe like that. I had no idea that I could handle an emergency like that or see all of that blood to be honest, but I just figured it out as I went. I felt completely calm – like I had the situation 100% percent under control.”

Thanks to Eckstein’s gut reactions, the boy is now safely at home, recovering. Prior to the accident, Eckstein was thinking about going into sports management.

“Now, I honestly am thinking about going into a field that has to deal with emergency situations,” he said. “I’m just grateful that I could help the kid, and I want to be able to help more people.”

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