Joseph P. Cockerill

Joseph P. Cockerill helped to save a man from burning, Waverly, Nebraska, September 23, 2021. A 41-year-old man was in the cab of a burning dump truck with an attached trailer after the truck traveled off a highway into a grassy field. Cockerill, 39, warehouse manager, was driving on the highway and stopped at the scene. He ran to the driver’s door and saw flames on the passenger side of the truck. Cockerill opened the driver’s door, where the man sat in the driver’s seat, unconscious, with his right foot caught between his seat and the center console. A maintenance technician stepped up to the open door and pulled on the man but could not release his foot, so he stepped aside. The man was on his back on the seat with his head leaning through the driver’s door opening. Cockerill climbed fully into the cab, where flames had entered the bottom of the cab between the seats, and knelt on the man’s torso. He grasped the man’s right leg and pulled but could not free his foot. He then lifted the man’s leg, twisted it, and released his foot. Cockerill backed out of the cab and he and the other man pulled the man out of the truck and placed him on the ground. Cockerill, the maintenance technician and a third bystander carried the man away from the truck, the cab of which was shortly engulfed by flames that rose about 20 feet above its roof and spread to the grass between the truck and the trailer. The man was taken to a hospital for treatment of an injury suffered in the crash; he was not burned.