TUSTIN, Calif. (WSVN) — A retired police officer was in the right place at the right time to save an unsupervised toddler who ran into the middle of a California road while chasing after a ball.
Darryl Pang says he was driving next to a park in the Los Angeles suburb of Tustin when he spotted a little boy by the gutter on the side of the road.
Pang made a quick U-turn and stopped his car so he could make sure the boy was safe.
“I got to here waiting for a parent to come running up,” he recalled. “I honk the horn, seeing a bunch of parents off to the side trying to get their attention to see if some would come up. I didn’t want to scare the kid.”
That’s when Pang’s dashcam shows the toddler bouncing his ball into the road and running after it. Luckily, the former cop managed to stop cars on the road and picked up the boy from the center lane and brought him to safety — still with no parent in sight.
“I’m actually thinking that at any moment now a parent is going to come running up because that’s what usually happens, you’ll get somebody panicked to come running up, and it didn’t happen,” he said.
It wasn’t until after he rescued the little boy that a man walked out into the street and retrieved the child. Pang said the man mumbled something as he headed back into the park, but he couldn’t understand him.
“We were taught a thousand years ago in high school drivers ed [about] the little kid chasing the ball in the street,” Pang said. “It still happens. It still happens.”
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