Many adults can be quick to judge teens, assuming they’re always up to no good. But that just isn’t the case.
Two teens from Mount Juliet, Tennessee, went viral when they put their lives on the line to save a 3-year-old girl.
One night, Dalaurence Holland, 15, and Zech Krinjnic, 13, were sitting and talking on Zech’s porch.
It was pretty late, and the sky was dark. There were no adults or parents around, so the teens were just chatting and enjoying the fresh air.
At about 10:15 PM, they were startled to see a form emerge from the bushes below.
“We were sitting on my porch up there, and then we were talking about clowns and stuff,” Zech recalled.
“And then, all of a sudden, we see this thing out in the middle of the road.”
The boys were perplexed by the thing and decided to go down and investigate. “I don’t know,” Dalaurence told NewsChannel 5. “I guess I’m just a teenager and thought, ‘Let’s do something stupid and chase it and see what it is.’”
“When I saw it, I thought it was a fox or some other kind of animal.”
“I didn’t want anything to end up dead.”
Curiosity got the best of the teens but, in this situation, it was all for the best. Dropping their conversation about clowns, the two darted towards the animal hoping to save it.
But when they got closer, they realized it wasn’t an animal— it was a 3-year-old girl heading straight for a busy highway.
The boys hadn’t realized it was a toddler at first but now, time stood still. The little girl was all alone and there wasn’t an adult in sight. But what was even w0rse, they soon realized, there was a truck coming directly her way.
“I saw headlights coming up the hill,” Dalaurence said.
“I was like, ‘There’s a truck. That’s a little girl. I’m going to grab it.”
Both teens raced for the little girl, but Dalaurence got there first. There was no hesitation in either of their actions as they put their lives on the line.
Dalaurence raced into the road, reaching the toddler just seconds before she would have been hit by the zooming truck.
Luckily for the little girl, he snatched her out of the way just in time.
“My mind went clear, and I was focused on getting the kid.”
“A truck was coming up the hill, and right before it would have hit her, he scooped her up and ran out into the middle of both roads,” Zech recalled.
“We just jumped out in front of the truck. We didn’t look both ways. We just jumped.”
Thanks to Dalaurence and Zech’s heroic actions, the little girl’s life was saved.
It’s unclear why the girl was on the road by herself, but, after the incident, her parents were later questioned by police, News Channel 5 reports.
As for Dalaurence and Zech, the two boys received a flood of praises when their story went viral online. Later, Mount Juliet officials even gave them a key to the city in honor of their good deed.