After spotting an elderly woman having a hard time crossing the tracks with an oncoming train, a New Jersey man hops out of his car and pulls her to safety with mere seconds to spare.
According to ABC7 News, good samaritan John Mango from Saddle Brook, New Jersey was sitting in his car at the train tracks when he spotted an elderly woman walking slowly with a cane. She approached the tracks with the barriers down and the warning lights on. Mango noticed that she started having difficulty and seemed to have gotten stuck on the tracks.
That’s when Mango leapt from his car and pulled the woman to safety, just in the nick of time before the NJ Transit line came barreling down the tracks.
It is difficult to see from the video below, but the train missed them by inches.
Mango recounted the event in the ABC7 News story:
“I’m watching and I see her going across and I’m like, ‘this isn’t feeling right...I saw the train was really coming. I sprinted onto the tracks and I pulled her by the arm. She was scared, like I was trying to do something...She actually stopped because she was scared, so then I tried grabbing her arm and then really tried pulling her. She was having a lot of trouble.”
The woman was unharmed but taken to the hospital as a precaution by paramedics. While he may have saved the woman’s life, Mango said he isn’t a hero and that he “just saw something and something needed to be done.”
Despite not wanting any notoriety from the rescue, police called Mango’s work afterward to thank him for what he did.