INDIANAPOLIS — As the state prepares to pay their final respects to fallen Indiana State Police Trooper Aaron Smith, one Indianapolis woman knows better than many the legacy Smith leaves behind. That's because she's alive thanks to him.
Jewel Green, 40, only met Smith once, but she'll never forget him or their encounter. That's because Green was in a life-or-death situation after being shot, and it was Smith who made sure it was not Green's day to die.
"I remember repeating over and over, 'Please help me! Please help me! I can't die today!'" Green recalled from that night.
"And he said, 'I'm not going to let you die!' He kept repeating it, 'I'm not going to let you die! I'm not going let you die!'" Green remembered Smith telling her.
Smith stayed true to his word.
"If it wasn't for him. I don't think I would have been here today," Green said.
Now, when she pictures a hero, Green sees Smith's face. That's because he's the one who showed up on the side of the highway on a night last October and never left her side.
"I met an actual hero," Green said, choking back tears.
The 40-year-old phlebotomist still doesn't know who shot at her car or why as she headed home that night from her sister's home.
Green was about to get off Interstate 70 at the Emerson Avenue exit when she heard a noise and felt her car shake.
"Sounded like my tire busted. That's what it sounded like to me," Green recalled.
When she pulled over and saw the blood coming from her legs, Green still wasn't sure what had happened until Smith showed up.
"I was trying to get out of the car. He helped me out of the car. He realized I was shot, and he jumped into action," Green said. "I don't even think he put gloves on."
"He just ran to his car and got some stuff, stuffed the hole in my leg and put pressure down and called for the ambulance to come," Green said. "I don't clot easily, so he did stop me from bleeding out because if he didn't make it there, if he didn't do what he did, I would have bled out on the side of the highway ... My son would have lost a mother. My family wouldn't have known what happened to me."
Instead, Smith was with Green in the hospital that night.
"He stayed with me that whole time when I made it to the hospital. He was in the hospital room with me that whole time," Green recalled.
He came the next day, too.
"He came. He checked on me the next morning, and he gave me his number, his personal cell number and said if I needed anything, somebody to talk to, to call," Green remembered.
Over the past eight months, healing after four surgeries and learning to walk again, Green never got that chance.
She wishes she had so she could have said thank you to Smith and hugged him.
"That's what I would do if I seen him again," Green said, wiping tears from her eyes.
Green was able to attend Smith's visitation this week, where she told 13News she hoped to tell his parents and his wife just how much he meant to her life and her son's.
"When you hear the words 'fallen hero,' nobody knows actually the extent of someone that actually is a hero," Green said, who's here today with her son because of the actions of someone else's son. "Rest in paradise, Trooper Smith, and thank you for giving me another chance at life and making sure that my son still has a mother."