Healthy Man Mysteriously 'Dropped Down Dead,' Heart Stopped For 17 Minutes Before Revival

A 28-year-old man from Hereford, England reportedly "dropped down dead" for 17 minutes when his heart stopped after singing and dancing inside a car. Her partner recalled the horrifying moment of seeing him dying all of a sudden.

Daniel Turner was with his wife Elishia Paxton, 25, and their children on the way home from a christening in Pendock on the eve of Aug. 14 when tragedy suddenly struck.

Paxton said the family went to a christening where she was asked to be a godmother. She and Daniel were busy running around "after the children playing on the bouncy castle."

"A friend had come to pick us up at 9:30 pm. All of us, including Daniel, were singing and dancing in the car, and then he just dropped dead instantly," she told Gloucestershire Live.

"We were literally five minutes away from home. My friend stopped the car, and we ran around to get him out of the car. I started doing CPR on him."

An off-duty officer helped them and took over the CPR. He said he knew a paramedic who lived three doors away from the incident and went off to get him.

The sudden collapse was terrifying as Turner was known to be healthy as he frequently went to the gym and worked as a roofer by trade.

Turner was defibrillated and was rushed by ambulance to Hereford Hospital, and Paxton was taken by another ambulance to the same facility ten minutes later.

As Turner had a cardiac arrest, he was put into a medically induced coma. He managed to wake himself up after 20 hours. The hospital staff tried sedating him, but he was sleeping on and off.

"Now he has short-term memory loss. On Sunday night, he must have called me about 20 times because he had forgotten we had spoken," Paxton said.

Doctors conducted a full body CT scan and a brain scan on Turner and found a shadow on his brain, but they said it could have been a stroke from the resuscitation.

Recalling the moments before the incident, Paxton said he noticed that Turner had been sweating a lot. However, the two of them chose to ignore it and went on to play with the children. In hindsight, Paxton admitted that she knew the excessive sweating was a sign of heart attack.

On Aug. 22, Paxton said goodbye to her husband because he needed to be transferred to a hospital in Birmingham. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, she’s unable to visit Turner.

"From the day he woke, he has been confused and is trying to piece everything together. The last thing he remembers is being sat in the church on the day of the christening," Paxton said.

Turner is scheduled to have an operation later this week wherein a defibrillator will be implanted, so that the device could send an electrical shock to his heart if it were to slow again in the future.