A Virgil father is lucky to be alive after being struck by a vehicle on Christmas Day.

Ken Rumsey, 52, was airlifted to a St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto with serious injuries Dec. 25, after a vehicle collided with a truck owned by a Good Samaritan who was helping Rumsey pull his daughter's vehicle out of a ditch.

It happened around 6:30 p.m. on Concession 7 and Niagara Stone Road.

Rumsey's daughter Hailey had hit a snow drift and gone into the ditch, so he and his son Dylan went to help get her vehicle unstuck. During the attempt, Dylan's vehicle also got stuck in the ditch.

That's when the Good Samaritan showed up.

“We were waiting for my cousin to come pull me out and some guy in a truck stopped to help,” Dylan Rumsey said.

As the were hooking the straps up to his truck another vehicle “came flying down (the road) and smoked us while my dad was under the other guy's truck.”

Rumsey said the impact threw him back about 10 feet into the ditch, while his father and the wife of the Good Samaritan took the brunt of the impact.

The wife of the good Samaritan, whose name Rumsey never got, was carried away on a stretcher.

“We’re pretty banged up but he got the worst of it,” Rumsey `said.

“When I got up my dad was laying beside the truck with his head split open, pretty well unconscious.”

The vehicle that struck the others, a red Volkswagen, was driven by a 64-year-old man from Niagara-on-the-Lake, whom Rumsey identified as Virgil resident Helmut Klassen.

Police did not do a roadside breathalyzer test at the scene and no charges have been laid.

Niagara Regional Police spokesperson Const. Phil Gavin said police “do not complete roadside testing for every collision.”

“The officers make the determination if it is necessary based on the totality of their investigation,” he said in response to questions from The Lake Report.

“Weather and road conditions were determined to have played a role in the collision.”

Rumsey said he feels for the people who tried to help.

“(They were) trying to do a nice thing,” he said.

“All our lights and four-ways were on. I saw my sister's car, turned off, from two kilometres away. It was clear as day.”

He said his dad now needs “a full set of teeth, stitches in his mouth, nose, face, head.”

Dylan Rumsey also has an injured hip, knee and ankle, but didn't go to the hospital.

“I didn’t want to. I wanted the paramedics to focus on my dad and the kids from the guy's truck helping,” he said.

Ken Rumsey is back home recovering now and is doing better, his son said.

“It’s mostly his teeth we are concerned for. They airlifted him as a precaution for a fractured skull,” Dylan said.

He said he'd like to get in touch with the good Samaritan, to thank him for his help.

“I tried to get the guy's name but he was a bit shaken up. I’d love to thank him again.”

The Good Samaritan was a 48-year-old St. Catharines resident, though police said privacy concerns prevent them from identifying him.