He was on his way to work.
Michael Coy – a 53-year-old UPS over-the-road semi driver from St. Paul Park, Minnesota – was heading to the company’s Eagan facility on the morning of April 18, 2024, when he saw the crash ahead of him on Interstate 94 near Snelling Avenue in St. Paul.
A vehicle had struck a lamppost and a guide rail. It was on fire.
The driver was unconscious behind the wheel.
Michael pulled over and ran to the car. He grabbed the handle of the driver’s door. Blocked by the guide rail. He tried the other driver’s side door. Also blocked.
Flames were licking at his feet and lower legs as he ran around the vehicle.
He opened the front passenger door. He climbed in.
He was now inside a burning car with an unconscious man, flames working their way toward the passenger compartment from beneath the vehicle and along its sides.
He helped the driver – Sam Orbovich, 72 – remove his seatbelt. He helped him shift position, getting him onto the center console with his feet braced against the driver’s door, preparing to pull him backward out through the passenger side.
Then the flames came through.
The passenger compartment – the space where Michael was kneeling – began to fill with fire. Flames pushed through the door opening. Through the dashboard. Through the vents. Through the floorboards.
Blistering heat forced Michael out of the car.
He came out through the passenger door as the compartment behind him became fully engulfed.
He had not gotten Sam out.
He didn’t leave.
A Minnesota Department of Transportation highway helper arrived with a window-punch tool and broke through the windows. Sam Orbovich pushed his legs through the opening. Michael and the other bystanders who had gathered – Kadir Tolla, David Klepaida, Tesfaye Deyasso, Lacie Kramer, and Tessa Sand – grabbed him and pulled.
They carried Sam Orbovich away from the burning car and onto the highway.
Both men were taken to the hospital. Sam for his injuries from the crash. Michael for smoke inhalation and heat burns to his face, his arms, and his legs.
Both men recovered.
The rescue had been captured on a dashcam mounted in one of the bystanders’ cars. The footage spread across the world – millions of people watching as ordinary people on a Minnesota interstate ran toward a burning vehicle and pulled a man from the flames. The Minnesota State Patrol awarded all six rescuers the Meritorious Citizenship Award.
Sam Orbovich went further. He nominated all six of his rescuers for the Carnegie Medal – the highest civilian honor for heroism in North America, awarded by the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission since 1904.
The commission reviewed every account. They looked at what each person had done and how much personal risk they had accepted in doing it.
They selected Michael Coy.
Because he was, in the words of Carnegie Hero Fund director Jewels Phraner, “the only one who entered the car from the passenger door, taking on significantly more risk than the others outside the car.”
He was inside. When the flames came in, he was still inside.
“Mike’s bravery in reaching into my burning car to reposition me was extraordinary,” Orbovich said, “and that heroism posed a great personal risk to himself. I would not be alive today if it weren’t for Mike and the other five people who saved me.”
Michael accepted the honor – and immediately said he wished all six of them had received it.
At the hospital, after the burns had been treated and the smoke had cleared from his lungs, Michael’s wife came to him.
She asked him to promise her he would never do something like that again.
He looked at her and told her the truth.
“I told her I couldn’t make her that promise,” he said. “Because if I had not done anything, I said you would have lost a huge part of who I was that day anyways.”
Read that again.
You would have lost a huge part of who I was.
Not “I had to be brave.” Not “I’m a hero.” Just – this is who I am. And if I had walked past a burning car with an unconscious man inside, I would have come home to you a different person than the one you married.
In the moments inside that car, Michael said he wasn’t thinking about his own safety.
“Not that I don’t love my life and my wife and my family,” he said. “I just had to do it. There were no questions about it.”
He was a UPS driver on his way to work.
He is now a Carnegie Medal recipient – one of 17 people in all of North America recognized this cycle for extraordinary civilian heroism.
He and Sam Orbovich have stayed in contact. Michael describes Sam as kind and genuinely appreciative.
And somewhere in Eagan, Minnesota, there is a UPS facility where a semi driver shows up for work and the people who know what he did on Interstate 94 quietly understand that they are standing near someone extraordinary – who would tell you, without hesitation, that he simply had to do it.
There were no questions about it.
Share Michael’s story – because some people walk past burning cars. And some people climb inside them. The difference between those two people is everything.