Denver Health Paramedics Honored for Recognizing Human Trafficking Victim

Two Denver paramedics were honored this week for helping save a victim of human trafficking, the Denver Channel reports.

Paramedic Laura Gehm and Paramedic Field Training Officer Julia Drahn received the Distinguished Service Cross at the Denver Health Foundation’s 4th Annual Paramedics Awards Celebration to Honor Community Heroes.

Related: Human Trafficking: It’s All Around Us

The award goes to paramedics “who performs an act of heroism involving a novel, unusual, or sudden situation of a serious and urgent nature that demands immediate action.”

The call happened earlier this year when Gehm and Drahn were on their first and only shift working together. The pair received a call to an apartment building about a woman in her 20s complaining of abdominal pain. Something seemed wrong.

Related: Look Beneath the Surface of Human Trafficking in America

The man was answering questions for the woman. The man did not want the woman to go with the paramedics to the hospital. When the woman was asked what drugs she was taking, the man said he was giving her medication every day.

Gehm and Drahn credit their training about knowing the signs of human trafficking for helping the woman escape the situation.

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Paramedics with man on stretcher in ambulance, showing low angle view.

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