Torri’ell Norwood, a 16-year-old girl in Pinellas County, Florida, saved her friend’s life just one day after completing CPR training. The teenager put the new skills to use after she and three friends were involved in a car accident on Feb. 20, CNN reported. 

Norwood and her friends crashed into someone’s yard and hit a tree when another driver slammed into the car. The 16-year-old, who was driving the car, had to climb out through the front window because the impact jammed the driver’s side door. While Norwood and two of the passengers escaped without injury, 16-year-old A’zarria Simmons was hit on her head. 

According to WTSP, people in the area urged the teens to run to safety, saying the car is “about to blow up. Everybody get out. Get out.” But Simmons wasn’t able to run with her friends. 

“When I turned around, I didn’t see A’zarria running with us,” Norwood told CNN. “So, I had to run back to the car as fast as I can. She was just sitting there unresponsive.”

The teenager, who completed a basic life support class at her high school one day earlier, pulled her friend from the car and checked her pulse, but there wasn’t one.

“A lot of people started to gather around to see what was happening. I started yelling, ‘Back up, back up, she needs space,” Norwood said. “That’s when I checked her pulse on her neck. I put my head against her chest, and I didn’t really hear nothing. So that’s when I just started doing CPR on her.”

The life-saver applied 30 compressions and two rescue breaths to help her friend regain consciousness. Paramedics then rushed the injured girl to the hospital.

“I don’t remember the hit or anything about [the] accident. But when I woke up, I was in the hospital. I was in shock. I was trying to figure out how I got there,” Simmons said.

As a junior at St. Petersburg’s Lakewood High School, Norwood participates in the school’s Athletic Lifestyle Management Academy, which prepares students for various careers in health science.

“We do vital signs and they learn how to take blood pressure and check pulse. We have just about 100 students in our academy,” instructor Erika Miller told CNN.

The program is also focused on teaching CPR.

“There are two components, a hands-on skills component where they have to demonstrate that they’re proficient in the skills of adult, child and infant CPR, how to help somebody who’s choking, as well as how to use an AED (defibrillator). And then there’s a written test component, showing that they retain that knowledge,” Miller said.

Norwood and Simmons, who have been friends since the seventh grade, plan to pursue careers in the medical field. Simmons said her friend is the kind of person who always wants to help someone.

“She will always help any way she can, to help anybody,” the teen said. “Even if it wasn’t me, if it was someone else and she knew she could do something to help, she would do it. So I wasn’t really shocked about that.”

Norwood said she never expected to use the lesson she learned at school.

“I was in class and I was doing it and I was like ‘this will never happen to me,'” the junior said. “Then it happened to me the day after. It’s crazy.”