Weatherford Bartender Praised for Saving Customer's Life

A bartender in Weatherford is getting big props for doing something good the other night.

"That's a little joke we have at the cantina, get out of the way, there's a local hero coming through," smiled Nicholas Murray, a bartender at Downtown Cantina off the courthouse square.

Two weeks ago, Murray put a different set of skills to the test to help a customer whose husband was in trouble. The couple was sitting at the end of the bar when the wife motioned to Murray to come help her.

The first thought was that the man was having a seizure, so they tried to lie him on his side.

"His wife checked for a pulse and he didn't have a pulse. So we figured his heart stopped. Next thing we know he's not breathing. So we learned later on, he was having a heart attack. In the moment we didn't know what was going on," Murray said.

Chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation followed until firefighters and EMTs arrived moments later.

"We were all doing our best to try to get him to stay okay as much as you can when you don't have a pulse and you're not breathing until they got there," Murray said.

"We didn't really understand how he was doing. We didn't know if he was alive or not, because, from our standpoint, it did not look like it was going to be a good outcome."

A couple of days later, though, the couple reached out to the general manager to let him know the customer "was doing amazingly well."

"They actually came to see me five days later, on a Saturday, just lookin' happy and healthy," Murray smiled.

"That's a really intense moment is the best way to describe it. It's a really good moment to see someone alive because in the moment it feels uncomfortable doing what you're doing but then to see, hey, it actually saved a human," he said. "It was rewarding but also humbling, that's the way I would put it. Kinda makes you realize that sometimes I feel like we have this thought process of immortality. Then the next thing you know, some people are out for dinner, and life gets real, real quick, you know what I mean?"

Murray says the wife of the man reached out to the restaurant and asked the manager to post the story on social media. The local paper picked it up and eventually, the story of the bartender hero got to City Hall.

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The mayor of Weatherford recognized Murray with a basket of gifts to say thank you for jumping into action to help a customer.

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Murray is a humble hero and quick to point out servers, firefighters and others stepped up to help that night, too.

"There's a lot of people who did a lot of things that day, so we're a community of heroes," Murray said.