MEXICO – Thomas Harrison was driving along Swift River Road on his way to work Tuesday morning when Tyler Richard came running toward him with blood on his chest calling for help.

“He said something to the effect that he had harpooned himself,” the 45-year-old carpenter for River Valley Home Improvements in Mexico said Tuesday night in a phone interview from his home. “He needed some help. He had hurt himself and needed some help,” Harrison said the boy told him.

“He said there was nobody home. He was there by himself,” so “I loaded him into the truck” and headed for Rumford Hospital a few minutes away.

“I knew I had to get him to the hospital. He was bleeding pretty bad. I could see blood on his shirt. He stuck himself with something. I didn’t even take the time to look at the wound. He was kind of going in and out of consciousness,” Harrison said, so he kept talking to the boy hoping he’d stay awake.

Richard, he said as dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and sneakers and had been staying at his grandfather’s home.

When Harrison got to the hospital, he said, “There was a fireman sitting in one of the firetrucks” out front, who quickly got a doctor to come out and wheel the boy inside.

With the youth receiving medical care, Harrison said, “I actually went back to the house to see if I could find someone else at the house” where the boy had been staying and notify them of the accident.

“I knocked on the door and left a note to say I had taken him to the hospital, and I came home,” he said. The note was on a business card with his name on it and a number to contact.

Once at his home at 705 Roxbury Road, he said he cleaned the blood from his truck and then headed down Swift River Road to get to work. He stopped at the grandfather’s house when he saw cruisers there. “I pulled over and talked to them and told them what happened,” he said.

The grandfather was there by then, he said.

Harrison said he learned later that the wound was self-inflicted by a gun.

“Crazy situation,” said the upstate New York native who moved here a couple of years ago, but he said he was able to remain “fairly calm.”