Houston Texans honor first responders and local heroes that saved fan

“I mean I felt a little tired when I was walking up through the parking lot, but once I got in here I was fine,” says Donald Stampley. He and his wife attended the Houston Texans game back on August 18 and at some point while watching his favorite team, he suffered a heart attack.

“A friend of ours that was sitting a few rows back had looked up and told her husband something was wrong and he was the first one to get down there," his wife Angel Stampley says. "He’s the one that started doing CPR on him”.

The on-field Harris County Emergency Corps crew heard someone was yelling for help and came to the rescue. 

“We actually had to climb an 8-foot wall to get to him quickly since we were on the field and he was in the second row,” says Medical Director Cameron Decker.

They continued CPR and were able to defibrillate him multiple times, before sending him off in an ambulance to Memorial Hermann. Stampley says he remembers waking up almost a week later still at the hospital.

“One of the nurses named Tim told me that if I would’ve been anywhere else I would’ve died because I was out for 30 minutes already and most people don’t recover from something like that,” says Stampley.

At Sunday's game, the Houston Texans invited him and the entire crew that worked on him, as well as city and county crews and Santa Fe responders, to be honored on the field before kick off.

"There is no other feeling like this," Decker says. "This is exactly why I became a physician, why our paramedics became paramedics. It’s the opportunity to save a life or at least be a part of saving someone’s life is an experience like no other and this is exactly why we do what we do.”

Stampley says he will never forget what happened and all the folks that stepped in to save his life.

"When you go through something like this, there’s no words to explain it," Stampley says. "I mean you can say 'thank you' all you want, but where is that going to take you. It’s just, they did an awesome job.”

The day of the heart attack, Stampley was wearing a J.J. Watt jersey. On Sunday, the Texans gave him a new jersey signed by the star himself.