Just four hours into his first day at Buckhead Meat Co., a new employee sat down in the sales manager’s office to begin onboarding. Minutes later, the manager noticed something was off—his new hire had suddenly slumped over.
“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” the manager shouted, his alarm drawing others nearby. Diane Mazza, walking past the office, heard the commotion and looked inside. What she saw instantly triggered her training.
Without hesitation, Diane grabbed the office AED. When she returned, the man was still unresponsive, his skin taking on a bluish tone. “He wasn’t moving. He looked bad,” Diane recalled. “I told the manager and another bystander, ‘We need to get him on the floor.’”
She immediately began CPR. “All I could think was: get blood to his brain, get air into his lungs,” she said.
As 911 was being called in the background, Diane tore open the man’s shirt and noticed a surgical scar over his heart—a clue that he may have had prior cardiac issues. Still, the dispatcher instructed her to continue CPR without delay. “I didn’t even check for a pulse. I wasn’t sure I’d find it. My adrenaline was through the roof,” she said. “I was going to keep going until help arrived. Nobody wants to die at work.”
Soon, coworker Carmen Christeleit joined and opened the AED. Diane placed the pads and delivered two shocks, but the man didn’t respond. She and colleague Katie Carbone then rotated chest compressions while a crowd gathered outside the glass office, silently hoping the stranger would survive.
First responders arrived within minutes. When asked if they should take over, the EMTs responded, “You’re doing a great job,” and finished prepping their own AED. One EMT began compressions while Katie provided rescue breaths. After administering another shock, the man suddenly jolted and opened his eyes.
“I called his name and he looked at me again,” Katie recalled. “He recognized it. He knew where to look. That was a huge sign—he was coming back.”
As he was loaded into the ambulance, the man briefly lost consciousness again but soon came to, speaking coherently. He was rushed to John F. Kennedy University Medical Center in Edison, New Jersey. Ironically, the new hire lived over an hour away in Pennsylvania and had come to train for expanding the sales territory.
While his wife coordinated transport back home, another Buckhead colleague, Patricia Benjamin, stayed at the hospital to support him.
“He was doing well—awake, alert, pink,” Patricia said. “I had never met him before that moment, but we quickly became friends. He had no personal items, no glasses, didn’t know anyone. I stayed with him until his family could.”
The man, in his late 50s, later learned that his pacemaker didn’t include a defibrillator—until now. “He was emotional and deeply grateful,” Patricia said. “He knew the outcome would’ve been drastically different if this had happened at home, alone, instead of at work surrounded by trained responders.”
As he prepared to return home, he joked with the nurse that he planned to play the lottery numbers “5/20” forever—the date of his rescue. With a smile, the nurse responded, “Don’t be greedy—you already won the lottery of life.”
The man’s survival wasn’t luck alone—it was the result of regular CPR training provided by Buckhead Meat Co., a division of Sysco Food Service. The company ensures every department has trained responders by offering free, on-site CPR sessions.
Katie, one of the key responders, had recently completed her first formal CPR course. “It made a huge difference,” she said. “The manikin gave feedback on compression rate and depth, and I’m so thankful we were given that opportunity. That training helped save his life.”
This powerful story is a reminder of why CPR training matters—and how an ordinary workday can become extraordinary when people are prepared to step in.