Carnegie HERO Project Spotlight: Christine Dawn King

Posted on by Jewels Phraner

The following was written by RDS student worker Devon Smith.

In my role at the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, I am working on aspects of the HERO Project, which aims to harness the Hero Fund’s century worth of data to study altruism through an open-source data portal.

A major part of my job is to ensure the data remains humanized, ensuring these people’s stories are honored and respected, rather than just being a statistic.

One of the important aspects of humanizing the data is consistently reading the hero stories, rather than just looking at them from a quantified data science perspective.

While converting the data to the Hero Fund’s new format, I came across Christine Dawn King’s story.

As someone who was raised in the Greater Philadelphia area, Christine Dawn King’s brave act on highway I-95 stood out to me.

When driving down the I-95, King noticed a man holding his 18-month daughter over the edge of the highway, threatening to drop her from 40 feet above the ground.

What I found remarkable about King is that she continued to prevent the assailant from dropping the baby, even after he revealed a gun and threatened to shoot her.

Fear is often regarded as the most powerful emotion in the human brain, but King continued to prevent the assailant from dropping the baby, opposing her fear and risking everything she worked for up until that moment to save her.

King’s act is an inspiring example of the power of providing assistance to others in need. King has inspired me in my day-to-day interactions to help others, even if I have to take a leap of faith to do so.

Photo: Hero Fund President Eric Zahren presenting Christine Dawn King with the Carnegie Medal, courtesy of Carnegie Hero Fund Commission.

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