When her young son was hit by a pickup truck, a stranger ran over to help

This story is part of the My Unsung Hero series, from the Hidden Brain team. It features stories of people whose kindness left a lasting impression on someone else.

One summer evening in 2010, Melissa Barbanell and her 7-year-old son, Calvin, headed to a park across the street from their home in Salt Lake City. She was on Rollerblades, and he was on his bike.

As they stood at the crosswalk, Barbanell noticed a pickup truck speeding toward them. Just then, Calvin started to cross the street.

“I told my son to stop,” she remembered. But 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.

That’s when her unsung hero appeared: a woman in her 30s with light brown hair. The woman had been jogging in the park, and when she saw what happened, she sprinted across the street. She turned out to be the perfect person to help.

“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 incredible relief — here was a competent person who would do everything she could to save her son’s life.

“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 of the car was identified and prosecuted for a hit-and-run. Calvin recovered from his injuries — which included damage to his liver and brain — over the next several years. Today, he’s 21 and recently graduated from his local community college with an electronics technician certificate.

In the blur after the accident, Barbanell lost track of her unsung hero. She doesn’t know who the woman was and she didn’t get her name.

“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.

My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.