A baby boy in South Africa found himself with a human guardian angel after he and his family were involved in a fatal car crash. Tulonga Neputa was with some of her colleagues when they stumbled across the horrific accident.

“You could see it had just happened,” Tulonga said. “A couple of other cars also stopped.”

Tulonga, however, was the only one who spotted the baby boy lying amid the smoldering wreckage. A mother of two herself, Tulonga threw open the door of the car she was riding in and raced over to the baby boy “panicking and praying.” She snatched the eight month old infant from the wreckage and tried to calm him down. “Don’t cry baby,” she kept saying between prayers, “everything will be fine.” The boy eventually stopped sobbing, but it was difficult for Tulonga to tell how badly he was injured.

“He was bleeding from the mouth and nose,” said Tulonga. “One of the other motorists said it looked as if his arm was broken, and we had to handle him very carefully…I was so worried about that boy. When I had to hand him over to the paramedics at the accident scene, I prayed and prayed he would be okay because I did not know if his parents were killed in the accident.”

Most of the baby boy’s family is still alive, though his grandfather was killed in the accident. The baby boy himself has recovered well. “Our little baby boy is okay,” said the boy’s mother, Nadja Heger. “It’s beyond our understanding how he survived this horrific accident! It’s a miracle. To some amazing people along this sad journey, we will thank you personally.”

Tulonga was one of those people that the family thanked, and she was able to reunite with the boy she jokingly calls her third son. “When he saw me today he put out his hands so I could pick him up,” she recalled. “Praise God, I was so happy to hold that boy.”

Tulonga’s frantic rescue was caught on film by a number of bystanders, and support for Tulonga has poured in from across the world. Tulonga wishes, however, that those filming had helped rescue the victims of the crash rather than standing around taking pictures of Tulonga begging God to have mercy on the baby boy. “God, you don’t take this one,” she said. “You cannot claim this one.”

Despite the apparent miracle she was involved in, Tulonga has been humble about her role in saving a child’s life. “I was just doing what any mother would do,” she insisted. Extraordinary or not, there is no doubt that the baby boy is lucky to have had an earthly guardian angel that day.