LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE) – A Louisville man on his way to work pulled over to check on a driver in a ditch. What he didn’t know, however, was that the man inside that car would soon be facing charges in connection with a violent “traffic altercation” just moments before.
For the first time, we heard from the man who found the suspect shot on the side of the road.
An attempted carjacking turned shooting turned car crashed all within a matter of minutes along a busy interstate in Okolona Thursday morning.
It was a confusing series of events that Nicholas Fiedeldey found himself at the tail end of, just trying to help.
Fiedeldey was pulling out of his driveway onto the Outer Loop on a rainy, but otherwise ordinary Thursday morning. That is, until he spotted something coming down the road that didn’t quite seem right.
“Immediately, when I took off to go on the Outer Loop, I saw a vehicle coming up the wrong direction,” he recalled. “So I slowed down a little bit and he just rolled right into the ditch.”
Fiedeldey pulled over and jumped out to help, running up to a smashed Hyundai.
“I asked him if he was doing okay,” he said. “Like, ‘Hey man, you doing alright?’ I got no response. Another pedestrian came up, and I went up to talk to her because she was seeing if we were okay. That’s when we both heard him say he was shot. So I immediately took my shirt off, ran over to him and started applying pressure.”
What the Good Samaritan didn’t know was that the wounded driver, 45-year-old Jason Calhoun, had allegedly beaten and strangled a man he carjacked on the Outer Loop exit off of I-65 just minutes before the pair met.
The Hyundai Calhoun was sitting in was that victim’s vehicle. The gunshot wound Fiedeldey was applying pressure to came from the barrel of that victim’s gun.
“Before this accident came out, we were alerted about a fight that happened on I-65,” LMPD Major Donnie Burbink said just an hour after Calhoun was taken to the hospital. “We believe that both of these are going to be related.”
Later that day, LMPD’s arrest report painted a clearer picture of how the fight played out.
According to police, Calhoun tried to carjack a driver broken down on I-65. That led to a bizarre fight in which Calhoun allegedly tried to take the driver’s gun and, when that failed, he tried to take the driver’s eyeball.
When Calhoun allegedly applied a headlock to the driver, he fired multiple shots and fled. That’s when Calhoun attempted to drive away in the stolen car, but was hit by a semi-truck and end up crashing in a ditch.
That’s where Fiedeldey found him.
“I just went in and tried to help him out,” he recalled. “It wasn’t like a huge shock or anything. Just instincts I guess.”
Fiedeldey said he didn’t know the full story behind Calhoun’s wounds until the next day, and even if he did, he said it wouldn’t have changed his efforts to help.
As of Saturday night, Calhoun remains in the hospital, but faces multiple charges in the alleged carjacking including attempted murder and robbery. We still don’t know the extent of the injuries of the man police say Calhoun carjacked.
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