He Usually Delivers Food. This Time, It Was a Man

After Fla. woman places call to wrong number, Jimmy John's staff helps her ailing brother
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 26, 2018 9:05 AM CDT
Jimmy John's Has Heartwarming Reaction to a Misdial
Pedestrians pass by a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop on Jan. 2, 2015, in Atlanta.   (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Lisa Nagengast has just gotten off her plane Saturday evening at the Tampa airport, fresh off a visit to Nebraska to help her ailing brother, when she received a distressing phone call: It was Greg Holeman, the brother she'd just left after his spinal fusion surgery, and he was in trouble, per the AP. The 48-year-old veteran was having complications: His operation incision was oozing, and his left leg had lost feeling. He lacked cash for a cab and didn't think his VA insurance would cover an ambulance, but he needed to get to the hospital, the Omaha World-Herald reports. Nagengast explains in a Facebook post she immediately placed a call to someone she thought was his social worker, then talked to that woman's boss, Jason Voss, who assured her a driver would soon be in touch to help get Holeman to a medical facility.

When driver Zach Hillmer called her to get Holeman's details, she asked why he didn't have them on hand as part of her brother's file. He filled her in on one tiny detail: "Umm, this is Jimmy John's," she says he told her. "You mean Jimmy John's like the food place?" she replied. Voss, night manager of the Columbus restaurant, had heard the panic in Nagengast's voice when she dialed the wrong number asking for help, and Hillmer, his delivery driver and a Navy veteran himself, agreed they should help her get her brother to the hospital. Hillmer picked up Holeman and took him to Columbus Community Hospital; Holeman is now doing OK and is already back home. "I will personally say [Jimmy John's] hasn't been my first place to go to, but it probably will be from now on," Nagengast tells the Columbus Telegram. (A Domino's driver may have saved a woman's life in Wisconsin.)

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