When you go on spring break you don’t normally expect to be involved in a life-saving situation, but that’s exactly what Paton resident and former Iowa State University football player Joe Doran did.

While on spring break in South Padre Island, Texas, on March 16th, Doran and some of the ISU football players were staying on the third floor of a hotel called The Inn, when they saw a black vehicle drive off of a dead end road and into a concrete canal. Doran, along with Anthony Lazard and Jack Spreen ran down three flights of stairs, jumped a fence and ran about 250-feet and without a moment’s hesitation, jumped into the canal to try and save the woman inside the vehicle. With his adrenaline running, Doran didn’t even notice that he had cut his foot on a piece of glass.

“We started punching the driver’s side window as the car was going down and we couldn’t break it out. She (the victim) started kicking the windshield, so we jumped up on the windshield and she finally spidered it enough to where Jack Spreen and I could start peeling back all the glass that was there (and) got a hole big enough to pull her out.”

He recalls the time it took to get her out of her vehicle.

“By the time we pulled her out and get her back on (the canal), I bet it was all under one and a half to two minutes, I mean it was quick. But if we were any slower like it could’ve been a matter of ten or fifteen seconds and it would’ve been a lot different story that we would be telling.”

The victim was later charged with an OWI, but Doran says she thanked him for saving her life.