Man’s wrong number saved his life, thanks to compassionate stranger

Last Monday, Ashley Yasick, 27, of Delray Beach, Florida, was checking her voicemail when she discovered a message from someone dialling a wrong number. The man sounded frantic, asking for help.

"It was one of those gut-wrenching phone calls and I knew right away I couldn't ignore it," Yasick told the Sun-Sentinel. "I called him back. Clearly he was trying to reach out to somebody."

When she called back, the man on the other end of the line couldn't speak.

"It was a very distressing phone call. I kept asking him 'Where are you?' but he couldn't really talk," Yasick said. "I kept saying, 'I need you to give me more information.' He kept telling me he was in the back room of the house."

Yasick then Googled the man's phone number to find out where he was from: Norwood, Pennsylvania. She looked up the number for the Norwood Police Department and called them, asking them to check in on the man.

She later learned that the distressed caller was Thomas Buck, an 84-year-old man from Pennsylvania, trying to reach his sister-in-law Audrey. He had fallen, was dizzy and short of breath, and couldn't get up.

Thanks to Yasick's call, he received the help he needed and spent several days in the intensive care unit at a nearby hospital.

"The final diagnosis was urosepsis," Buck's daughter Leslie Notor said of a toxic infection of the blood. "They had to blast him with ungodly antibiotics because he had been slowly deteriorating for the last week."

After Buck was told that a stranger called the police on her father's behalf, she reached out to the police department, seeking Yasick's contact information.

"This woman had saved our father's life and we really wanted to thank her," Notor said.

"I didn't understand the severity of the situation," Yasick insisted. "I was just following my instinct. In my gut, I knew he needed help."

Wrong numbers don't always lead to life-saving heroics. Sometimes they lead to love.

A British couple ended up tying the knot after one of them drunkenly dialled a wrong number — then called back to apologize for the rudeness.

And in 2007, a simple typo in an email address helped two strangers love.