The child couldn’t have been older than three. His clothes were caked with dirt, like he hadn’t changed in days. Scratches covered his small hands and face as he shuffled slowly beside the highway. Completely alone. Traffic whizzed by without a second glance. Nobody stopped.
A police officer driving past initially assumed the child was homeless. He pulled over, stepped out of his patrol car, and cautiously walked toward the little boy.
“Hey there, where’s your mom and dad?” he asked softly.
The boy raised his exhausted, frightened eyes but didn’t speak. Then, all at once, he broke down in tears.
Without hesitation, the officer scooped him up and placed him safely in the back of his car. Despite the visible cuts and bruises, the child was alert and breathing. At the station, doctors checked him over while his photo was shared online in hopes someone would recognize him.
Just hours later, the boy’s relatives came forward. What they told police was devastating.
The child’s mother had been missing for days. She hadn’t been home, and her phone was off.
Officers returned to the stretch of highway where they’d found the boy and began searching the area. A couple of hours later, they spotted something in a steep ravine below—an overturned car, mangled beyond recognition. Beside it lay a woman’s body. It was his mother. She hadn’t made it.
The accident had happened days earlier. The car had gone off the road and tumbled down the embankment, completely hidden from view. The mother died on impact, but somehow, against all odds, her three-year-old son had crawled free from the wreckage and climbed back up to the road.
For days, he wandered through the rough terrain until he finally reached the highway—where a police officer happened to see him.
It was nothing short of a miracle that the boy survived the crash, escaped the wreck, and made it to safety.