Source: batangastoday.com

When Stephen St. Bernard (yes, that’s his real name) got off work yesterday at 2pm, I’m sure he didn’t suspect he’d be saving someone’s life on the way home. But that’s exactly what happened when he caught a 7-year-old girl who jumped from her 3rd story apartment.

The Huffington Post reports:

A New York City bus driver was being hailed as a hero for saving a 7-year-old girl who fell three stories from an air conditioning unit outside a Brooklyn building.

“I just prayed that I’d catch her,” Stephen St. Bernard recalled after rescuing the child on Monday.

“‘Please let me catch her, please let me catch her.’ That’s all I could say,” he added.

St. Bernard said he was walking home from work when he observed a commotion outside the Coney Island housing complex. He saw the girl standing on the air conditioning unit, seemingly unafraid and moving about.

It wasn’t clear how she got there, but witnesses told the Daily News that she crawled out by pulling aside the unit’s accordion-like plastic partitions that keep the air conditioner secured in the window.

An amateur video shows St. Bernard yelling up to the girl, telling her to go back inside. She suddenly falls, eliciting horrified screams from neighbors, and he catches her in his arms.

“I picked her up and carried her. … She kept looking around. She never closed her eyes. She never lost consciousness,” he said.

The girl was taken to a Coney Island hospital with minor injuries. St. Bernard, a father of four, suffered a torn tendon in his shoulder.

Neighbors said the girl was a special needs child.

The mother declined to be interviewed on camera, but NBC says she was inside the apartment watching her other child and did not see the girl standing outside on the A/C. The child’s aunt, Monique Hardin, told them that Stephen is her hero and that he definitely did their family a favor.

It’s always great to hear that people still selflessly go out of their way to assist complete strangers. What an amazing story!

Check out this video of the incident (Shoutout to whoever caught this on tape!)

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