When he was only 6-years-old, Eli Beer and his brother witnessed a bus bombing while walking home from school in Jerusalem. Eli heard someone calling out for help from amidst the chaos, but he didn’t know what to do and ran from the scene.
The experience was life-changing. Eli’s feeling of trauma following the attack motivated him to learn how to help save lives in emergencies. At the age of 15, Eli became a volunteer EMT working on an ambulance corps. One day, Eli’s team responded to a call of a 7-year-old child choking on a hot dog. Due to traffic and road congestion, the ambulance took over twenty minutes to get to the scene. When they finally got there, Eli and his team began CPR, but moments later a doctor who lived nearby arrived and declared the child dead. There needed to be a faster way to get help to patients in their time of need.