Lost and Bloodied After a Fall, a Navy Veteran Got Home Because a Stranger Stopped. Now He Wants to Thank Her.
Steven Lunenschloss, a 73-year-old Navy veteran, fell face-first on a Plano, Texas, sidewalk after becoming disoriented on an evening walk without his phone. A woman who said she was an Army wife asked if he was okay and ordered him an Uber home. He and his wife, Verjean, are trying to find her to say thank you.
Just News Desk, Correspondent||4 min read
PLANO, Texas - It was dark, Steven Lunenschloss remembers, and he was somewhere he should not have been. The 73-year-old Navy veteran had gone out for a walk on Oct. 6 without his cellphone, and somewhere along the way he lost track of where he was.
Mr. Lunenschloss told NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth that medical problems sometimes leave him with a kind of brain fog that makes it hard to find his way. That evening, the confusion was compounded by a fall. He caught his foot on an uneven section of sidewalk and went down face-first onto the concrete.
"I caught a rise in the concrete on the sidewalk, and I just took a header," he told the station. "I mean, I planted my face right into the concrete. It hurt like hell."
A residential street sign in Plano, Texas, Sept. 2, 2007. Illustrative image of a Plano neighborhood; it does not show Steven Lunenschloss, the woman who helped him or the place where he fell. Photo: Loadmaster (David R. Tribble), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Source page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DerbyshireLane.jpg
He got back on his feet, his face and hands cut and scraped. But he was still lost, and he could not remember the phone number of his wife, Verjean.
Then a woman noticed him. As Verjean Lunenschloss recounted the moment to NBC 5, her husband greeted the stranger the way he would greet anyone. "He said hello, waved at her, you know, how are you? And she goes, 'Sir, are you okay?' Obviously he wasn't," she said.
He could not recall the phone number, but he did remember his home address. The woman ordered him an Uber, and the ride took him home.
"That was just the nicest thing anybody's ever done for me, as far as I'm concerned," Mr. Lunenschloss said.
15th Street in Plano, Texas, Oct. 10, 2015. Illustrative image of a Plano street; it does not show Steven Lunenschloss, the woman who helped him or the place where he fell. Photo: Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plano_October_2015_49_(15th_Street).jpg
Now the couple is trying to find her. They want to thank her, they told NBC 5, and to pay her back for the ride. Mrs. Lunenschloss has posted about the encounter on Nextdoor, the neighborhood social network, in the hope that someone will recognize the circumstances.
"Just to thank her, I mean, kindness should be thanked," she said.
The search has few clues to go on. Mr. Lunenschloss is not sure exactly where he fell, though he believes it was somewhere north of Eldorado Drive in Plano. The woman told him her first name, he said, but it did not stay with him. "I got the attention span of a gnat," he said. "So I didn't remember it."
One detail did stay with him: she told him she was an Army wife, a connection that has given the encounter particular meaning for a Navy veteran.
"She just went out of her way beyond whatever I could possibly expect," he said.
As of this writing, Just Positive found no published report that the woman has been identified. For the Lunenschlosses, the cost of an Uber ride is the smaller part of what they hope to repay.
"There are really good people still out there in the world," Mrs. Lunenschloss said.
"It's nice to know that there's hope," her husband said.
Source: NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth, Maria Guerrero, "Plano veteran hopes to find stranger who came to his rescue," Oct. 13, 2026: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/plano-veteran-hopes-to-find-stranger-who-came-to-his-rescue/4090637/ . All quotations are as published by NBC 5. The woman who helped Mr. Lunenschloss has not been publicly identified and is not named here. Station photos and video are not reproduced. All images are illustrative, freely licensed photos from Wikimedia Commons; none shows Mr. Lunenschloss, his wife, the woman who helped him or the place where he fell.
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