Shocking video footage shows a former college football wide receiver and US Marine making the most important catch of his life saving a 3-year-old boy thrown from a burning three-story balcony in Phoenix.
Phillip Blanks, 28, said he sprang into action Friday when he heard a bunch of commotion going on outside his apartment building and ran outside barefoot.
He noticed there was an apartment completely engulfed in flames and there was a woman getting ready to toss her son to another man standing close by, a video posted on social media by a witness reveals.
“There wasn’t much thinking,” Blanks told KABC. “I just reacted. I just did it.”
WATCH:
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Blanks got to the boy just in the nick of time as his mother desperately screamed out “GRAB HIM!,” the video shows. The former wide receiver at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, California, and a former US Marine credited his clutch hands to time spent playing the game he loved so much.
“I know how to catch,” Blanks told KABC. “I learned how to catch a football. So I’ll give some credit to football.”
This young man is a real hero. He gave credit not to himself, but to football.
The boy came down “twirling in the air like a propeller,” Blanks said.
“His ankle got twisted up as I was diving,” Blanks continued. “The guy who was there with me — it looked like he wasn’t going to catch him. So that’s why I stepped in. I just wanted to make a better catch.”
Sadly, Rachel Long, the boy’s 30-year-old mother, didn’t survive the fire, KABC reports.
“She’s the real hero of the story,” Blanks told the station. “Because she made the ultimate sacrifice to save her children.”
Who is this guy? Somebody hire him as a motivational speaker or something.
A mother’s love is what saved the child.
The boy and his 8-year-old sister, meanwhile, were critically injured in the fire, WWMT reports.
Blanks now wants to “track down” the two kids, as well as their father, to help them during their recovery he told reporters.
