Paramedic Bride Helps Out at Accident Scene, Pic Goes Viral

Woman rushed from her wedding when she heard dad, grandparents were in crash
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 13, 2015 9:07 AM CDT
Paramedic Bride Helps Out at Accident Scene, Pic Goes Viral
Sarah Ray—always on the job.   (Facebook/Marcy Martin)

A post-wedding car crash, a concerned bride, and her photographer mom all came together in Tennessee to create a picture you won't see in too many wedding albums: a woman in her wedding dress helping out at the scene of an accident. The now-viral photo—posted on the Montgomery County Facebook page and already boasting more than 12,800 likes and 5,600 shares—shows paramedic Sarah Ray on her Oct. 3 wedding day, hiking up her wedding dress on the side of the road in Clarksville with emergency vehicles behind her. She received a call right before her reception that her dad and grandparents got into an accident en route to the party. "The car was totaled, that's all we knew," she tells the Leaf-Chronicle. No one was seriously injured, and her mom, also on the scene, captured this photo as Ray made her way back to her vehicle.

"She's giving me that look, like, 'Really? You're going to take my picture now?'" her mom tells the paper. "It was just about the contrast—the beauty of her and then the chaos in the background." She adds to NewsChannel 5: "I love this photo because it shows her character." Ray's actions were definitely in character. "She exemplifies our profession," the local EMS chief tells the Leaf-Chronicle. "She is an excellent paramedic. Personally, she's a very humble and compassionate person." But Ray, who ABC News notes has been a paramedic for five years, scoffs at being called a hero. "It's not heroic," she tells the paper. "That's just what we do every day, and it was family. ... It just happened that I was in a wedding dress." Ray and her husband, also a paramedic, aren't taking a honeymoon. Instead, the Leaf-Chronicle notes, they went right back to their shifts at different stations after the "I do's." (An Illinois paramedic delivered his own child.)

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