BRIDGEVILLE, Pennsylvania — Devlin Robinson wasn’t supposed to be at his Pennsylvania home that afternoon. Neither was his neighbor Mark Macala. And Adonis Whitmer, the FedEx driver who pulled in front of Macala’s driveway to deliver several packages? Well, he wasn’t supposed to be on that route that day either.
Had any of those three men done what they were supposed to do that day, June 13, it is likely this story would have a dramatically different ending.
Whether it was divine intervention or happenstance that all three men were in the same place at the same time, the circumstances ultimately led to saving Whitmer’s life when he collapsed while unloading a package from his truck, suffering from cardiac arrest at the same time Macala looked out his window and Robinson pulled into his driveway across the street.
Robinson, a Pennsylvania Republican state senator who served one combat tour in Afghanistan and two in Iraq in the Marines, said he started the morning at the local coffee shop, Bella LaBean Coffee on Washington Avenue, when a series of delays in his schedule turned his day upside down.
“I decided to get my car washed, fill up my gas tank, then change into a suit and spend the rest of the day downtown,” he said, adding that 60 seconds after he pulled into his driveway, the FedEx driver collapsed.
“Had I not done any of those things that morning, I would’ve been inside my house even getting changed and missed the ability to help,” he said.
Macala, an IT specialist for PPG Industries, also wasn’t supposed to be home. But because he was waiting for a contractor to show up, he was working from home. It was Macala’s dog’s persistent barking at the FedEx driver at his front door while he was trying to participate in a work conference call that drew his attention outside.
Whitmer, too, wasn’t where he was supposed to be, in that he was not on his usual route, Robinson explained.
“The person that has the usual route was overloaded with packages that day, so the overflow packages went into a second truck,” Robinson said. “So Adonis was essentially the utility man and went to take on the secondary truck, so he wasn’t supposed to be there either.”
Whitmer was in the process of delivering a sectional couch to Macala, who came out to ask him how many more packages he had left to deliver.
“Adonis turned around to answer him and didn’t even get the seven out,” Robinson said. “He just said, ‘Se—,’ and then fell over.”
As Macala rushed toward Whitmer and got no response when he asked if he was OK, Robinson was pulling up in his driveway across the street.
“I heard my neighbor talking, and I saw that he was kind of kneeling over, and I thought that he was just kind of doing yard work,” Robinson said. “So I went up to my porch and put the key in my door to open up the door, and I saw two legs sticking out from underneath my neighbor, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is serious,’ so I just literally dropped everything and ran across the street.
“When I came upon him, I knew just from Marine training you have to check the airway, let him breathe,” he explained, saying at this point Whitmer was on his side in the fetal position, so he plopped him on his back.
“It was then I saw he wasn’t breathing, and I thought that he was having a seizure or a stroke, so I knew I had to open up the airway, so I dug my knuckle into his sternum and I gave him a sternum rub, and that’s whenever he took his first breath,” Robinson explained. “He took a really deep breath.”
His labored breathing, though, worried Robinson.
“So, at this point, the dispatcher is on the phone with my neighbor and telling me to start compressions until the ambulance got there,” he said.
Robinson said it only took one minute and 37 seconds for the ambulance to show up, but it felt much longer when he was trying to keep someone alive.
The entire thing was caught on Macala’s Ring doorbell camera.
“Almost exactly by the time that Whitmer fell over ’til the first professional responder showed up was just six minutes, and we were already doing CPR within three minutes, so it was like everything happened at the right place, right time, perfectly,” Robinson said.
Six days later the three men had a reunion.
“Adonis is doing well, he now has an external defibrillator that he has to carry around with him all the time until he goes back to the hospital and gets one implanted in his chest,” Robinson said, adding that the doctors still aren’t sure why that happened to him.
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This was not the first time Robinson has been a rescuer of sorts. Four years ago, when he first sought office, running against incumbent Democrat Pam Iovino, in another case of sheer coincidence, it was her wallet he found lying on the street miles from either of their homes but within their suburban Pittsburgh district.
Weeks later Robinson shocked western Pennsylvania Democrats and Republicans by winning that seat, which had started trending Democratic in 2016. This year, in his first bid for reelection, he earned the support of the Labor Council over Democrat Nicole Ruscitto for his seat representing the 37th state Senate District — a laurel that highlights his work in state government supporting labor and industry.
