LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE/CNN NEWSOURCE)– A Kentucky high school student used her sweatshirt as a tourniquet to save a gunshot victim on the way home from school.

It would have been so easy to stay in the car and just keep going — a lot of people would have done that.

“I had to do something. I’m trained in stopping the bleed so I had to do something. Anything,” Nylaia said.

Six days after she came to the aid of a wounded man, Nylaia takes the experience in stride.

A 16-year-old junior with her eye on a basketball scholarship, Nylaia relied on emergency first aid she learned in class as a sophomore.

Using her sweatshirt to make a tourniquet, she stopped the bleeding and kept the man conscious until paramedics arrived.

“You’re watching all of this going on. What’s going through your mind?”

“I was proud of my daughter because she told me that — pullover dad. And I didn’t want to pull over. It had been a long day. I wanted to get home,” said Adam Carter, Nylaia’s father.

The Carters didn’t know it at the time but police say the man was shot 2 and a half miles away, near this intersection in the 3700 block of West Broadway.

And he tried to drive himself to the hospital.

If you catch all the lights, you might be able to get there in about 15 minutes. But in this case, the man only made it about halfway — that’s apparently when the loss of blood cut his journey short.

“When you first saw him, what did you see?”

“Just blood. Blood everywhere. His clothes were just a mess,” Nylaia said.

“You were checking to see if there was an exit wound?”

“Yes, but you couldn’t really tell. So I was like OK, I just need to stop the blood. Make sure he stays conscious and wait for the ambulance to get there,” she said.

“What class was this you took again?”

“Did they teach you about bullet wounds?”

“Yes, and stop the bleed.”

And it was a lesson well learned.

Days after leaving the scene, Nylaia and her father visited the man in the hospital.

He was understandably grateful and utterly surprised to find out she was only 16.

“And he remembered her being there. But she had a book bag so he thought she was the paramedic. So we had a chance to talk to him and pray with him and I think that she has a lifelong friend now,” Adam said.

“Yeah, I did what I was supposed to do. He’s alive and that’s all that matters,” Nylaia said.

Nylaia hopes to earn a basketball scholarship and eventually go into sports medicine, possibly in physical therapy.

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