A New Jersey teacher with an injured ankle heroically ran into a moving, unmanned SUV, which stopped him just before he reached a group of students, amazing new videos.
Surveillance footage on Wednesday, the first day of school, shows a father jumping out of his white SUV to give his daughter an iPad he left on his return to Linden Soehl Middle School, he said NJ.com.
After fleeing, the unattended SUV began rolling toward more than a dozen children waiting outside the building, the video shows.
While the father was running backwards to try to stop his vehicle from the front, physics teacher Valerie Tauriello ran to jump inside and stop it, even though she had a support boot on her left leg.
“It was a situation where a lot of people could have been injured,” Tauriello told NJ.com.
“Without hesitation, he just had to take action and let that moving car not be able to enter the school or injure the children,” he said.
“It was very hard to jump on a moving car. I never realized it would be a difficult task, ”he told the local dam.
He said, due to an ankle injury, that he initially tried to call the car owner, but soon “thought I was the only one who could get to that car.”
“I know I can’t run that fast, so at first I was a little frozen,” he said.
“But I was like, oh my God, I have to stop this car or it will hurt someone.”
Principal Gwendolyn Long praised the teacher, saying she “did not hesitate to risk her life to save our students.”
“That’s the person he is,” Long told NJ.com. “The Soehl Middle School family is just blessed to have it.”