This is a 7:42 p.m. update of a story originally posted at 1:08 this afternoon.

By GEORGE GRAHAM

ggraham@repub.com

EASTHAMPTON - Car wash employee Stephanie M. Carpluk fought for her life Sunday morning when a spinning scrubber brush latched onto her scarf, cinching it tighter and tighter.



It was brief struggle.



"I pulled the scarf but it wouldn't go anywhere," the 19-year-old Chicopee resident said. "I was scared, I didn't know what the outcome was going to be. ... After that, I blacked out."



Golden Nozzle customer John A. O'Leary, of Southampton, who had just paid Carpluk moments before, saw her strangling against the spinner and knew he had to act quickly.



"When I saw it happen I said, "This is not good,'" O'Leary said.



O'Leary just happened to have a pocket knife in his pocket. He leapt out of car, now moving on the car wash rails, and moved to cut her free.



"I remember looking at my knife, thinking if I cut this off, I am liable to cut her throat," the Southampton resident said.



Instead, O'Leary used the knife to cut the end closest to the spinner and soon she broke free and slumped to the floor.



O'Leary pulled her out of the path of the machinery, realized she wasn't breathing and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation - a skill he learned in the 1970s when he was an undergraduate in college.



"It kind of came back," O'Leary said, adding she was "pretty white."



After a time Carpluk began breathing on her own. Another customer, meanwhile, called 911 and brought a blanket.



O'Leary said he kept reassuring the woman that help was on the way and repeatedly told her not to go to sleep.



Carpluk, now with two black eyes and deep red welts around her neck, is in good condition at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield. She is expected to be discharged Tuesday.



Carpluk said she plans to call her rescuer later and thank him for saving her life.



"No question about it, I would have been dead if he hadn't come," said Carpluk, a 2008 graduate of Chicopee High School.



O'Leary said he doesn't consider himself a hero. He said he acted to the best of his abilities with a pocketknife he has had since high school and his decades-old skill of rescue breathing.



"If she required anything more she would have been in trouble because I didn't know anything more," O'Leary, a wildlife biologist, who works out of the state Department of Fish and Game in Westboro.



O'Leary said he had the knife only because he was planning on taking some cuttings at his greenhouse later that day.



Carpluk, the only employee at the Northampton Street car cash, said she had been cutting through the car wash tunnel to change some bills in the office safe.



Carpluk's mother, Karol M. Johnson, also of Chicopee, said it was a miracle that her daughter is alive.



"If it wasn't for that man she wouldn't be here now," Carpluk said, adding that it scares her to think that the car wash was operating with only her daughter in attendance. "It was miracle that he saw her."



Johnson said she talked O'Leary on the telephone Monday night.



"It was very emotional," Johnson said. "A million dollars wouldn't be enough to repay him for what he has done. She's my one and only daughter and he saved her life."



Carpluk said she has been Golden Nozzle for six or seven months and typically works at the car wash that it operates on Memorial Avenue in West Springfield.



Carpluk said wore her scarf to work every day and was never told that it was a dangerous thing to do. "Everybody saw me with it," she said.



A spokesman for the car wash's parent company, F.L. Roberts of Springfield, told the Associated Press that it is investigating the incident.

Company president Steven Roberts said he thanks the "exceptionally courageous" O'Leary.