The Stranger Who Brought a Mother Back: A Story of Kindness
One summer evening in 2010, Melissa Barbanell and her 7-year-old son, Calvin, were at a crosswalk in Salt Lake City. Barbanell was on in-line skates, and Calvin was on his bike. As they waited to cross, a pickup truck sped toward them.
“I told my son to stop,” Barbanell recalled. Then, the unthinkable happened. “The pickup truck hit him, knocking him off the bike and across the road, where I saw him apparently lifeless. And the truck drove away.”
Barbanell, a trained first responder, was frozen with fear. That’s when an unsung hero appeared. A woman in her 30s with light brown hair, who had been jogging, sprinted across the street.
The woman turned out to be a nurse, and her presence offered Barbanell an immediate lifeline.
“She came and she identified herself as a nurse,” Barbanell said. “And she went to my son. … She examined him, and she said the words, ‘He’s breathing. He has a pulse.'”
Barbanell felt an incredible wave of relief. “At that moment, she was the person who allowed me to come back into my body, and to go on,” Barbanell said.
Along with another man who came over, the woman held Calvin’s head still until emergency vehicles arrived.
In the months that followed, the driver was apprehended and prosecuted for a hit-and-run. Calvin recovered from his injuries, which included damage to his liver and brain, over several years. Today, he’s 21 and recently graduated from his local community college.
Barbanell never learned the name of the woman who helped her that day, the woman who saved her from total despair. “But the woman that day — who allowed me to go on in the face of not knowing if my child was dead or alive — will be with me forever,” she said.
