'You Don't Look Like You're Having a Heart Attack', Trooper Told Passenger

Dash cam footage of a traffic stop in September shows a trooper skeptical over a Lemont man’s plea that he was having a heart attack.

The trooper curbed the car in which William O’Neil was a passenger, as his son rushed him to the hospital Sept. 27. Michael, the younger O’Neil, was clocked going 82 mph in a 55 mph zone on Interstate 355.

“You don’t look like you’re having a heart attack,” the state trooper told O’Neil, 60, in a video obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times. “I don’t know if you were just telling me that because he was speeding, but I’m kind of confused right now.”

O’Neil was in disbelief as the trooper wrote his son a $1,500 speeding ticket and insisted on calling an ambulance rather than provide them a police escort.

That ticket on Thursday was reduced to a $175 fine, but O’Neil still questions the trooper’s judgment throughout the ordeal.

“...I’d still like to know where his head was,” he said after Thursday’s hearing, according to the Sun-Times.

Watch the video and tell us what you think in the comments.

At one point in the video, O’Neil is seen walking outside the vehicle, and the trooper shows concern over his stability on foot.

“You want to stay somewhere, you know, if you fall over?” the trooper can be heard asking.

The ambulance took O’Neil to Adventist Bolingbrook Hospital—9 1/2 miles from where they were stopped—instead of Advocate Good Samaritan, just 6 1/2 miles away, the Sun-Times reports.

State police have stood by the trooper’s actions, saying that police policy “strongly discourages officers from escorting civilian vehicles in medical emergencies due to the extreme hazard not only to the escorting officer, but also to the occupants of the escorted vehicle and other motorists.”

The son should have called an ambulance for his father as, “The chances of causing a crash increase significantly during self-transport, because motorists tend to drive erratically and speed excessively during medical emergencies.”