Ronnie Whatley Obituary , Death – A Perdido man died shortly after being flown to a Florida hospital by medical evacuation helicopter after a truck he was working on reportedly slipped from a jack or set of ramps and fell on him. The man, later identified as 50-year-old Ronnie Whatley, died shortly after arriving at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola after suffering massive head and chest trauma, according to reports.
Whatley was airlifted to the hospital from the scene of the accident, a Johnson Road residence, in “very critical condition,” according to reports.
NVFD personnel and MedStar ambulance crews were dispatched to the rural site around 1:04 p.m., according to Nokomis Volunteer Fire Department Capt. Jerry Gehman.
Dispatchers initially radioed that Whatley’s wife Connie reported her husband was “changing a tire when the jack broke and the truck fell on him,” according to official reports. Connie Whatley later explained that her husband was changing his truck’s oil rather than the tire.
According to Gehman, the first emergency responder on the scene, an NVFD officer discovered a floor jack and used it to lift the truck enough to remove Whatley from beneath it. Connie Whatley and Hunter Leino removed the jack from the injured man before rescuers arrived.
“I was going to lift the truck with airbags,” the volunteer captain explained, “but Tristen [Gehman, an NVFD lieutenant] found the jack and we used it.”
Four MedStar paramedics resuscitated the man and restored blood pressure for “15 to 20 minutes,” according to Gehman, before a flight surgeon from a MedStar air ambulance spent more than an hour performing various medical procedures inside the ground ambulance.
“They made a tremendous, valiant effort to save this man,” Gehman said. “The crew went above and beyond protocol to help this man,” the captain says.
When Whatley was deemed stable enough to fly, he was transferred to a helicopter and flown to a hospital in Pensacola, where doctors tried but failed to save the critically injured man.
