Local Couple Helps Vegas Man After Fall from Sign

Based on the win-to-loss ratio, it's not what most people say about Las Vegas, but Tara and Richard Montgomery were in the right place at the right time Wednesday morning.

The couple, who own Montgomery Gardens in Paducah, were able to help a worker who fell approximately 100 feet from a scaffold while working on a sign at the MGM Grand on the Vegas Strip. They were just across the street when they saw him fall.

Just before he hit the ground, he collided with a palm tree, which turned his body just enough to not land head-first. Landscaping and mulch around the bottom of the sign apparently cushioned his fall, but the couple said he still hit the ground pretty hard.

They  told a security guard Tara was a retired nurse, and he let them through a fence to get to the man, later identified as Charles Schueler, within about 30 seconds of his fall.

While not wanting to move the unconscious man, Tara helped his airway stay open while Richard prayed. By the time the ambulance arrived, the man was awake and in obvious pain. When later asked where he was, Schueler said, "in church," apparently because he heard Richard's prayer.

Schueler works for YESCO, an electrical contractor that was hired to renovate the sign. He was taken to University Medical Center, where the Montgomerys tracked down family at the hospital and got an update on his condition.

"We were able to talk to his family - his mother and his four brothers. They just hugged us, probably 20 times they gave us a hug. They were very appreciative and we were able to pray with them, for their son, and for his surgery this afternoon," Tara Montgomery said.

Thursday's surgery was to fuse a broken vertebrae in Schueler's back, but he has no spinal cord or brain injuries. He does have a broken arm, leg, and shoulder, and a partially collapsed lung, though.  

Richard and Tara were only in Las Vegas because they won the trip. While attending a buying event in Atlanta for their store, they placed an order with a supplier and got to spin a wheel for a prize. They won a trip to visit that supplier's showroom in Las Vegas, where a similar wholesale buying event was held this week.

She said they wouldn't have been there otherwise, and she's humbled by how God set everything up, and that she was able to help.

"It gives me chills to think about how  He worked out all the little details of it," Montgomery said.