Not all heroes wear capes, but Aaron Allen and Jolisa Jones, two siblings, sure deserve them after jumping into action to save a couple and a baby from their overturned vehicle that had landed in a retention pond over the weekend.
According to Fox 13, Allen and Jones, who both work for Ashley Furniture, were driving a delivery truck along the I-75, near the Pasco-Hillsborough line, north of Tampa, Fla., when a white Chrysler side-swiped a couple’s Toyota RAV4 on Friday morning, forcing them off of the road. The couple’s car rolled over and landed in the retention pond, WXYZ notes.
“The car pretty much just blind-sided them, and I’m pretty sure they were just as scared, and I was shocked,” Allen told Fox 13. “The first thing I could do was to spring into action.”
The siblings saw the vehicle overturned in the pond, with water seeping in. After failing to break the windows, the two decided to flip the vehicle back over themselves, because who needs Captain America in this situation?
“I saw that water was seeping into the car, where it was turned upside down,” Allen said. “We tried to break the windows, but that didn’t work. So the only thing I could think of was to flip the car over. So I told my sister to help me so we could flip it over to its side. So what happened is after we flipped it over to the side, I took my shirt off and wrapped it around my fist and I used my fist to break the windshield off.”
Allen said when he realized there was a baby in the car, he immediately thought of his own 4-month-old little girl.
“There was actually a mother, a father, and an 11-day-old baby inside,” Allen recalled. “I just immediately thought about my daughter and what I would do if I were in that situation.”
The couple, identified as Thomas and Diana Windsor by WXYZ described feeling the sensation of the car shift with disbelief.
“We knew someone was trying to lift the car up and my initial thought was ‘there’s no way they are going to lift this car on its side,’” Diana told WXYZ.
The dynamic brother-and-sister duo, however, did not walk away unscathed. Allen’s tendons in his arm were torn after breaking the windshield, and Jones injured her fingers during the rescue, according to Fox13.
“As my fist was coming out of the windshield, it hooked the glass and it pulled my skin all the way back in a big chunk,” he explained. “The glass tore into my tendons in my arm.”
Neither the adults nor the baby in the car was hurt, however, the child was taken to the hospital as a precaution.
“Some angels,” Diana said describing the siblings.
“Yeah, angels. Guardians. Heaven sent,” added Thomas Windsor.
The car that swiped the couples SUV fled the scene. Florida Highway Patrol is still searching for the driver.