A Vietnam veteran injured in the line of duty was about to have a lousy Memorial Day weekend when his motorized scooter broke down on a sidewalk in San Diego on Sunday.
Two police officers, Eric Cooper and Milo Shields, spotted 67-year-old Gil Larocque waving for help. And when they couldn't get the scooter started, they decided to push Larocque all the way home, a distance of about a mile.
“He told the other officer, ‘Are you up for a walk?’" Larocque told Fox San Diego. "The other officer said, ‘Yeah.’ They gave me a push all the way home. If it weren’t for them, I don’t know what I would have done."
The San Diego Police Department posted a video of the push on its Facebook page:
The police department said Larocque needs the scooter due to injuries sustained in combat.
“I got back all messed up,” Larocque told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “My legs.”
"The least I could do was push him, you know. That's the least I could do," Shields told 10News. "He's sacrificed and given so much to this country."
Larocque told Fox the scooter has a 20-mile range, but he had only gone three miles before it lost power. Larocque also told 10News he needs the device to run errands for himself and his father, a 90-year-old Pearl Harbor survivor.
“About halfway through, we realized it was Memorial Day weekend,” Cooper told the Union-Tribune. “We would have done it for anyone, but we definitely wanted to get that guy home.”
The scooter is being repaired.
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