A 12-year-old girl narrowly escaped a terrifying kidnapping attempt, thanks to the quick thinking of a brave stranger. Amy Martinez recalled the 2018 incident to KTLA, explaining that she was walking to Lathrop Intermediate School in Santa Ana when a homeless woman suddenly grabbed her. “I thought that I was never going to see my mom or my family again," she recalled. Amy described how the woman approached her, wrapped her in a bear hug, and began leading her away.
"I'll never forget the way she looked at me," the woman told NBC Los Angeles. "Her eyes were screaming for help." She quickly pulled over and asked the child if she was OK, and Amy said no. "She doesn't know if it's a mother having an issue with her daughter, but something doesn't look right because the suspect is homeless and her hair's messy,'' Bertagna said of the stranger. "So she makes a turn, comes around and asked the young victim, 'Are you OK?' and the victim looked at her and shook her head no, and she could see the fright in her eyes.''
Thinking fast, the woman came up with a plan. "She said she had five seconds to think of something to save this child," said Bertagna. "She told the suspect she was the child's mother and demanded her back." Bertagna added that the woman's motherly instincts kicked in, and after insisting three times, the suspect finally let Amy go.
"I was basically yelling, 'Let her go,' so as soon as my voice changed, she let her go and Amy walked into my car," the good Samaritan said. The rescuer called the police and the child's family as she drove Amy to school. "It's a place where there's a lot of cars and not one stopped until this lady came, in our eyes, she's our angel," said Cinthia Esparza, the girl's aunt. Based on a detailed description provided by the rescuer, police arrested a 34-year-old woman named Claudia Cruz Hernandez on suspicion of kidnapping a minor younger than 14. Praising the woman who stopped the possible kidnapping, Bertagna said: "We always say if you see something say something. Well, she saw something and did something."
Amy’s mother was overwhelmed with gratitude. "I just want to say thank you so much and I hope that there's more people like you out there," she said. Meanwhile, the rescuer said she would do it again if she had to. "You're a parent, you see somebody else's child in danger, automatically you react as if it was yours," she said.
This article originally appeared 3 years ago.
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