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Astonishing video footage caught heroic Utah students lifting a car to rescue a school staffer and her young children who were trapped under it outside their school. Pneumatic Car Jack
Layton Christian Academy staff member Bridgette Ponson was leaving work with her kids Tuesday afternoon when a driver backed up into them while temporarily blinded by sunlight, officials said.
Surveillance showed how a stream of at least 20 students raced over to lift the car to free Ponson and her kids, 2-year-old son Archer and 3-year-old daughter Brightley.
“I hear all these commotions, people telling me, ‘Come help, come help!’ so I drop my stuff and ran over,” sophomore Theo Roach told KSL-TV.
“We all just got together and started lifting up that car,” said Roach, who heard “Lift” being yelled in several different languages by international students at the private school.
“I looked under the car, and the baby was lying there,” another hero student, eighth-grader Utulei Simaumea, told the outlet.
“And the mom was like, ‘Help! Help! Help!'” Simaumea said. “I was in shock, and then I immediately told myself, ‘Think about Mom.’ I said, ‘What would a person do for your mom?’”
School CEO Chris Crowder recalled his pride at how “all these kids from different countries just come running out and lift it up.”
“Girls, boys, it didn’t matter, they all just took a spot in the car and lifted it.”
Students said their adrenaline kicked in. “I feel like we probably look like not the type of people to be able to lift the car, but we did it,” Roach said.
As the kids lifted, an Air Force senior airman who was at the school to pick up his children helped pull out the mom and children, who he admitted fearing would be doomed.
“I was like, ‘Hey guys, let’s get the car high enough so we can get the kids out,’” Senior Airman Dominique Childress told Fox 13.
The 3-year-old girl was able to crawl out and Childress was able to save the baby boy clutched in the arms of his mother, who was rescued about 15 seconds later.
Although baby Archer was unconscious and his face was purple, his rescuer soon found a pulse.
He was airlifted to a hospital but does not appear to have broken any bones or suffered serious injuries, a miraculous outcome shared by his sister.
Their mom suffered the brunt of the injuries from when she was cradling her young son to protect him, and is expected to need several surgeries, her school said.
“It’s a miracle,” Crowder, the school CEO, told KSL.
“I’m very proud of our kids … the kids just ran and without even having to tell them what to do, they just knew what to do.”
Childress also said that even though he was the one in uniform, the children were the real heroes.
“They are the purest form of the word ‘hero,’ and they deserve every single bit of praise and worship that they’ve gotten because what they did was not easy for a teenager to do,” he said.
2 Ton Floor Jack Police are still investigating the crash, and it is unclear whether the driver will face any charges.