It’s the stuff you might expect only to see on TV or in movies — the upbeat kind with happy endings.
Thankfully, that is just what happened in Burbank, California — the Southern California city that’s home to Warner Brothers, Universal and Walt Disney studios — as a toddler fell from three stories up into a stranger’s arms and onto a box spring mattress.
“It feels like I watched a TV show, like it didn’t happen to me,” Konrad Lightner, who identified himself as the man who caught the child and fell with him, told CNN affiliate KABC.
Sunday was moving day for Lightner and wife Jennifer, a typically exhausting if not momentous endeavor.
Until, that is, they spied a youngster hanging out of a third-story window of an apartment building and called 911.
According to Burbank fire Capt. Peter Hendrickson, calls for help came shortly after 5:30 p.m. (8:30 p.m. ET), after witnesses saw the child crawling out of the window.
Enter the box spring.
It was was placed under the window, and although Hendrickson did not name the Good Samaritans, the Lightners said it was their mattress and Konrad Lightner’s arms that came to the rescue.
The toddler fell only to be caught, and together the toddler and the catcher fell onto the box spring.
Jennifer Lightner told KABC that the whole episode “didn’t seem real until he was hanging from (a) chord, because there was no way he was going to get back.” It was then, she added, that the couple threw down their box spring mattress.
