We’d all like to imagine that if we aren’t around to protect our children that another kind soul would step in to do so. Thankfully a complete stranger stepped in to save the life of 12-year-old Amy Martinez.
When a woman tried to snatch her away a stranger stepped up and pretended to be her mother to thwart the kidnapping.
Amy told KTLA that she was walking to her school, Lathrop Intermediate School, when a woman who is believed to be homeless approached her. Claudia Hernandez Diaz was taken into custody as a suspect in the attempted kidnapping.
“She just came up to me and went like this,” Amy said simulating a bear-hug. “And then she started walking with me away.”
Amy was terrified and screamed for help.
“She told me in Spanish not to cry, but I wasn’t even crying,” Amy said.
Thankfully, someone heard Amy scream.
“I thought I wouldn’t see my mom or my dad again,” Amy told NBC Los Angeles. “She was saying that the demons are coming, Satan is here.”
A good Samaritan was driving her own child to the school when she saw Amy in distress.
“Amy was kind of struggling to get away, so then those were the signs that something wasn’t right,” said woman, who did not want to be identified, told ABC 13.
At first, she wasn’t sure if Diaz was Amy’s mother or not, so she asked Amy if she was OK and Amy told her that she wasn’t.
“I’ll never forget the way she looked at me,” the woman said. “Her eyes were screaming for help.”
She yelled over to Diaz and said that Amy was her child and to take her hands off of her. She had to say it a few times before the woman finally let go.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m going to live,'” Amy said.
The poor little girl must have been absolutely terrified! Police said it was the woman’s quick thinking that saved the child.
“She said she had, in her mind, had five seconds to come up with something to save this child,” Cpl. Anthony Bertagna of the Santa Ana Police Department said.
The woman took Amy and drove her to school where her parents and the police were called.
Police blanketed the area and arrested Diaz. Now the good Samaritan is being hailed as a hero, but she says any parent would have done the same.
“When you’re a parent and you see somebody else’s child in danger you automatically react as if it was yours,” she said.
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