U.S. Postal Service employee Joseph J. Clark doesn’t think of himself as a hero, but he’ll always be one to Cassandra Villano.
On May 16, 2009, while delivering mail on Route 502 in Pittston Township, the 60-year-old rural carrier from Old Forge went to Villano’s aid when she collapsed outside her home after being bitten by what was later determined to be a copperhead.
He sucked the venom from the wound on her left hand and then waited with the young woman and her family until an ambulance arrived.
“I just helped somebody in need,” Clark said. “I saw someone in trouble and reacted.”
On Thursday, Clark will be among seven Postal Service employees from the Northeastern Pennsylvania area honored for heroic acts or good deeds during an 11 a.m. luncheon at the Scranton Post Office on Stafford Avenue.
Villano, now 19, said it is a deserving recognition.
“He’s a very wonderful person – and an exciting guy to get mail from,” she said. “I’m just grateful he did what he did.”
Villano acknowledged her memory of the incident is hazy. She was doing yard work, pulling weeds from beneath a boat behind her family’s home, when she felt something grab her hand. She didn’t realized what had happened until she snatched her hand back and saw the snake.
She now believes she lost consciousness for several minutes before getting up and stumbling to her front yard, where she fell to the ground again. Clark, who had watched Villano and her three younger siblings grow up while delivering the family’s mail for 14 years, pulled up just in time to see her drop and her mother, Melissa, rush to her side.
While Villano lay convulsing and drifting in and out of consciousness, one of her brothers noticed the snakebite. As her father, Eric, spoke with 911, Clark said he took the phone and asked the dispatcher whether it would harm him to try to suck the venom out of her hand.
Although Clark said he has some first aid knowledge and experience, a snakebite was something new to him, and he wasn’t certain what to do. The dispatcher, he noted, “didn’t say not to do it.”
“I proceeded to suck what I could out of there and spit it out,” he said. “It was just instinct, I guess. You don’t know if it helped or didn’t help.”
It was the fourth time in five years Villano had been bitten by a copperhead, a streak of bad luck that leaves both her and her parents at a loss. However, Eric Villano said his daughter is an explorer, the kind of person who is “always turning over rocks.”
“It’s almost like some kind of magnetism,” he said. “It’s something I can’t explain.”
But Villano said it was by far the most severe bite she had suffered and is thankful Clark “had the guts to suck out the venom.”
“I wouldn’t be here today if he didn’t,” she said.
For his part, Clark is uncomfortable with the hero tag and deflected credit to the emergency medical crew that took Villano to the hospital and the doctors who treated her at Community Medical Center.
“I don’t think like that. You just react to the situation and do what you have to do to save someone’s life,” Clark said. “I hope someone would do the same for me if I were lying there. If you see something, don’t drive by. There may be something there you can do.”