New Mexico mom, Jackie Rodriguez and her daughter, Heaven Chavez, had quite a day on Saturday. Earlier in the day, one of their friends was involved in a fatal car crash and just hours later they were driving when they heard a distress call from someone. "My window was cracked when I heard somebody yelling for help,” Rodriguez recalls, “I told my daughter, ‘I think somebody's yelling for help.’ She said, ‘Turn around Mom.’"
An enormous sinkhole had developed at the base of a bridge crossing the Rio Grande in Los Lunas and had taken a huge chunk of the sidewalk out. A father biking over the bridge with his son was swallowed up by the sinkhole and was clinging to a pipe spanning the pit. While waiting for emergency services to arrive, Chavez risked her own safety to help the man. "I was holding on to the fence like a spider man trying to help him but trying to save myself as well," Chavez recalls.
Chavez ultimately helped pull the man out of the sinkhole, likely saving his life. On a day that was an emotional rollercoaster, the mother and daughter are so thankful to have been there to help the father. "I drove home in tears because what if? What if I didn't hear him?,” Rodriquez wonders out loud. “His son could have lost his father today."
Source: KOAT