Photo: Jiaxing City Police
This man is a hero.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Jul 27, 2022
A good samaritan walking along a road in eastern China is being hailed as a hero after he stopped what he was doing to save a toddler who had fallen out of the sixth floor of a building.
People are praising the man for his bravery in catching the falling child as they don’t know what could have happened to her had he not been there.
Video footage of the falling toddler being caught by the man has gone viral.
31-year-old Shen Dong was parking his car across the street from the building where the little girl had just fallen out of the sixth-floor window.
Shen heard a loud bang and looked over to see that something had fallen onto the steel roofing on the first-floor terrace of a housing complex.
The man ran over, alerting a woman who was also passing by, and helped him get in position to save the girl.
Shen threw his phone down and prepared himself to catch the two-year-old girl who had just fallen four stories.
She slipped along the side of the terrace and plummeted toward the concrete but was saved by Shen and the woman who helped him catch her.
Local police released the video of the incident that occurred on July 19, 2022 and gave an update on the well-being of the young girl.
The girl, who is from Tongxiang in the Zhejiang province, suffered injuries to her legs and lungs but is otherwise in stable condition, thanks to Shen.
“To be honest, I cannot remember the details. I cannot remember if my arms hurt or anything. It was just instinct to reach out to her,” Shen told local newspaper Qianjiang Evening News.
Shen, who works at a nearby bank, called emergency services the moment he noticed something had fallen out of the window, but immediately threw his phone away in order to save her when the time came.
He said that he didn’t even realize it was a young girl who had fallen out of a window until she started moving on the steel roofing — movement that caused her to fall again before being caught.
“It was lucky I made it in time. Otherwise, I would feel absolutely horrible,” he said.
He believes that the child survived because of the steel roofing materials that softened her fall.
The video spread like wildfire on the Chinese microblogging platform, Weibo, after the Weibo account of the police bureau of Jiaxing city, posted the footage.
“He is a superhero, stepping forward bravely at a critical moment. I hope he can get a mobile phone as a reward because the old one must have broken,” one user commented.
Many people pointed out that it’s a miracle the child even survived the first fall, and that if she missed the steel roofing and fell straight into Shen, it would have been far more dangerous for both of them.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Since graduating from Rutgers University, he spends most of his free time gaming or playing Quadball. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.