Families donate AEDs to state police
Hollidaysburg troop receives 10 devices
Trending
Last September, a few days after surviving a cardiac arrest on the practice field due to first responders' quick application of an automatic external defibrillator (AED), Hollidaysburg football player Spencer Davis was in a garden outside UPMC Children's Hospital, with tears in his eyes.
"Why did this happen to me?" Spencer asked his mother, Jennifer Davis.
She told him she didn't know why it had happened to him, but suggested that her son had a choice: he could dwell on what had occurred -- due to a blow to the chest at a critical brief interval during his heartbeat -- or he could "make changes."
Her son didn't hesitate: he chose to work for change.
"We need to make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else," he told her then. And in cases where it does happen, like it did famously to Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin in 2022, they needed to work to be sure the situation could be quickly reversed, as it was with himself and with Hamlin, he said.
In keeping with that resolution, the family's Spencer Davis Foundation teamed up recently with the Gregory Moyer Fund of eastern Pennsylvania to purchase 10 AEDs -- five each -- to outfit the patrol cars used by troopers at the Hollidaysburg barracks of the state police, headquarters of the six-station Troop G.
With that $15,000 gift, Troop G became the third in the system with one of its station's patrol cars to be outfitted with the lifesaving devices, said Troop Commander Tom Hertlein at a news conference Monday to announce the donation.
Every year, bystanders using AEDs save approximately 1,700 lives in the U.S., according to the American Heart Association.
That number could swell if more people had easier access to AEDs and knew how easy they are to use, according to a fact sheet from Zoll Medical Corp., an AED manufacturer.
All the officers at the Hollidaysburg station are already trained on the kind of Zoll machines that the two charitable organizations donated, because there is a Zoll AED already located at the station, Hertlein said.
The machines instruct users in an electronic voice on what to do next when they lift the lid, making the lifesaving procedure easy, Hertlein said.
The machine itself detects whether to administer a shock, based on the vital signs it records when leads are placed on a victim's chest, according to Hertlein.
Just last year, there were two instances in Troop G territory where troopers saved lives using cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, Hertlein said.
It's possible that things would have gone even better if they had had AEDs in their cruisers, he said.
While the Spencer Davis Foundation is based on inspiration derived from a life that was saved, the Gregory Moyer Fund is based on inspiration from a life that was lost -- for lack of the timely AED application.
Like Spencer Davis, Greg Moyer was a high school athlete.
At the halftime of his first varsity basketball game in 2000 in a rural area of the Poconos, Greg's heart stopped due to previously undiagnosed hypertrophic cardiomyopathy -- an enlarged heart -- said his sister Abbie Moyer, who attended the news conference.
Often, the first symptom of that condition is sudden death, Abbie said.
It took 54 minutes before an AED became available, according to Greg's mother, Rachel Moyer, who spoke at the news conference.
"This can happen to anyone, anywhere," Abbie Moyer said of cardiac arrest.
When the Davis family began to act on the resolution that Spencer made in the hospital garden, they discovered that they'd assumed that AEDs were more widespread than they really are, and that more people are familiar with them and trained to use them than they really are, according to Jennifer Davis.
But the subsequent efforts to overcome those deficits have been "empowering," she said.
She has seen, at training events, that people's fear of the devices have "turned into confidence," she said.
The Moyers are working with lawmakers to mandate that AEDs be placed in schools, police cars and other public places, according to Abbie Moyer.
The two families began cooperating when Abbie, an employee of Zoll, met the Davises at an awareness event at the Altoona Area High School, Jennifer said.
The families "hit it off," she said.
"The goal is to get AEDs everywhere," Rachel Moyer said.