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What It Feels Like...

(page 7 of 17)

… To Save a Life

Alli Khan, 51
This Springfield restaurateur unknowingly made all the right choices at all the right times to put him where he needed to be to save a life.
BY MATT LEMMON

On the night of November 19, 2006, the registers at Alli’s Family Restaurant were balanced perfectly. No one called owner Alli Khan to ask about his restaurant’s hours, or with a wrong number. No tables or equipment needed re-cleaning. He didn’t forget his keys or his wallet as he left the restaurant. Alli’s car was facing eastward. As he turned left onto Chestnut Expressway, heading home, the street was eerily empty—not one oncoming vehicle kept him from making the left-hand turn immediately.

If any one of those things had not happened, Nicholas Robinson would be a dead man.

Like most restaurant owners, Alli Khan is a creature of routine. The 51-year-old native of Pakistan opened his eponymous restaurant in 1999 after years working for Ziggie’s Café. Alli usually leaves between 10 and 11 p.m. on Sundays, his busiest day (and a day when receipts often don’t match). If his car is facing westward, he’ll take a right on Chestnut, drive back roads to Mount Vernon Street and go home that way; when it’s facing east, he’ll take a left on Chestnut and go that way. You could call it superstition, or habit. Most nights, he says, are exactly the same.

But on this night, as he drove down Chestnut, nothing was the same.

Less than a mile east of his restaurant, in the 4000 block of West Chestnut Expressway, a car, headed eastbound, had T-boned another automobile, which lay crumpled and burning. Gas collecting in the gutter formed a strip of fire along the curb. As Alli pulled over, he saw a young woman standing in the road, as well as the driver of the eastbound car. A third person—20-year-old Nicholas—lay unconscious in the passenger seat of the burning car, his body slumped into the driver’s seat. “I can remember his eyes were white, rolled up in his head,” Alli says.

Alli didn’t think, he just acted. Through the open driver’s side door, Alli tried pulling on Nicholas’s arms, but the crumpled passenger door had pinned his feet to the floorboard. Acutely aware of the heat of the burning car, the interior plastic melting and dripping on his skin, Alli physically got inside the automobile, grabbed Nicholas beneath his armpits, braced his feet on the edge of the seat and pulled with all his might. “All I kept thinking was ‘This car’s going to blow’ because of the movies I watch,” says Alli, an avid James Bond fan.

Suddenly Nicholas came free, losing his pants in the process (“That’s how I knew it was a boy,” Alli says.), and the two flopped onto the pavement. Instantaneously, Alli says, the car went up in a ball of flame—the windshield had finally fallen in, giving the flame a fresh batch of oxygen. The closeness of the call stunned him. “Two or three seconds later, and that boy would have been dead.”

When reminded that he, too, could have died, Alli tears up a bit. “I would feel sorry for my kids,” Alli says, speaking of the sons, Noah, 11, and Adam, 7, he has with Christine, his wife of 22 years. “I get emotional, you know?”

As it was, Alli suffered a number of burns on his hands, arms, face and head, most of which healed within a few weeks. Nicholas wasn’t as lucky: His mother, Michele Marsh, says he still has some memory issues and was in the hospital for weeks. The young woman, Nicholas’s girlfriend, had been driving the car, although Alli says he doesn’t know what caused them to veer into the opposite lane, where they were struck by the oncoming vehicle (Alli says both Nicholas’s girlfriend and the other driver escaped injury.)

Alli demurs when you call him a hero—he says he would do it again if faced with the same situation and hopes other people would do it for his kids. He has built a rapport with Nicholas and his family, inviting them to his restaurant to eat. “I feel like I’m obligated, like I’m his mentor. I want to be in his life and I want to see him successful.” Alli says Nicholas, with his dark skin and dark eyes, could be his son.

Even with the late-night rescue, the near miss with a fireball and the near-perfect scenario that allowed him to rescue Nicholas, Alli says the true spine-tingling moment came a few weeks later, when he was going through some of his personal papers. He came across his visa, which allowed him to immigrate from Pakistan, and noticed the date: October 22, 1986—less than a week before Nicholas was born. Thanks to Alli, Nicholas will celebrate his 21st birthday this month.

“I feel like I came to this country to just save that boy,” Alli says.