Fate. Luck. Serendipity. Divine intervention.

Call it what you will. But a Beaver County man may owe his life to a pair of good Samaritans who chose not to pass him by.

The selfless couple — a wife and husband headed home to Evans City after spending the evening with friends — drove upon a car wrecked in a ditch around 9:10 p.m. Saturday on Crab Run Road in Lancaster Township.

At first glance, the car appeared empty. But it was still running.

The couple, who asked to remain anonymous, stopped. The woman exited her vehicle to take a closer look. She saw a man slumped all the way over in the front seat of the car.

The 30-year-old woman shouted to her husband, 34, to call 911. The man in the car was not moving or breathing. She checked for a pulse. It was faint.

“His face was gray,” she recalled, “and his lips were turning blue.”

The unresponsive man could not have known that fortune was on his side that frigid night. The helpful stranger was a nurse practitioner certified in basic and advanced life support with intensive care unit experience. She works at the Lung Health Institute in Seven Fields.

She assessed the situation: the man had no sign of trauma, no indication of injuries. She shook him. She yelled, “Sir, are you OK? “Sir, can you hear me?”

No answer. Her husband pulled the man out of the car and laid him on the ground. She immediately went to work, her professional instincts in command of the life-and-death situation at hand.

“I was going back to what I knew,” she said, “and what I knew to do.”

She tilted the man's back, trying to keep his airway open. Soon, his weak pulse was gone.

Her husband held up his cell phone on speaker mode, while she told a 911 dispatcher that she was initiating cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

By chance, another good soul, this one a nurse anesthetist, happened to drive upon the emergency, stop and step in, holding the man's airway open.

The woman performed two rounds of 30 chest compressions, counting out the numbers out loud. She checked the pulse again. It was weak, but it was back.

“I followed protocol,” she said. “So I continued.”

She did a third round of chest compressions.

“He started breathing,” she recalled.

She stopped CPR. The man slowly awakened, just as a Harmony EMS crew arrived. She guessed it had been 10 minutes from the time she stopped to help. Still thinking first of her patient, she gave the man a blanket to shield him from the freezing temperatures.

“After that,” she said, “I started shivering from the adrenaline.”

Her work done, she and her husband — recent transplants from West Virginia — left as humbly as they arrived, even before Lancaster Township police got there.

Officer Christopher Pipkin spoke to the ambulance crew and identified the driver, Brett D. Charlier, 27, of Fombell. Pipkin inspected the wrecked car. He noticed a burned spoon on the driver's side floor and a blue and silver pipe, police said. Inside the open center console was a used syringe.

The officer chatted with Charlier, who advised he had skidded off the road and into the ditch. He told police he was fine and did not need medical treatment. He offered another piece of information: He shot heroin before driving that night, according to the police report.

Pipkin arrested Charlier for suspicion of driving under the influence of a controlled substance and took him to UPMC Passavant in Cranberry Township for a blood test. Charges are pending toxicology results.

The nurse-turned-hero knew nothing about the findings of the police investigation. For her at that moment, guided by compassion, she only wanted to help.

“I just thought about his mom,” she said of the stranger she rescued, “and, hopefully, how relieved she would be.”

And as it turned out, Charlier told police that he was driving to his mother's house in Connoquenessing Township when he crashed — and nearly died.

Lancaster Township police Sgt. Mike Cornell praised the woman for her altruistic action.

“What she did,” he said, “went above what a normal person would do.”