It’s my birthday today, and in honor of it, I wanted to share with you a good news story that will warm your heart, restore your faith in humanity and provide a wonderful object lesson about how appearances can be deceiving.
Alex McClean, aged 21, from Ebbw Vale, in Wales, was driving along the A465 highway, heading to a playgroup with her 9-month-old baby Lilah in her car seat in the back when warning lights flashed on the dashboard and the car lost power.
Alex managed to pull over to a layby, but within a few moments smoke began to pour into the interior of the car. She rushed out, but when she tried to open the back doors to get to Lilah out, the car had automatically locked. She tried both the passenger seat and the rear door behind it where Lilah was, but couldn’t open either.
Alex screamed for help, but none of the drivers in the cars streaming by paused or stopped. She began to get hysterical and was trying to smash the windows with her keys as the hood of the car began to turn brown from the flames beneath the hood.
Wesley Beynon, a welder fabricator from Merthyr Tydfil, was driving back to his workshop after picking up a car part with his uncle, 58-year-old Marc Willding, when he saw the car on fire and the young woman near the passenger door screaming that her baby was trapped inside.
Wesley immediately pulled over and he and his uncle jumped out. Through the window he saw flames from the engine and the hood as he forced open the driver’s door. It was terrifying, but instinct took over. He reached over, pushed open the passenger door, and unclipped Lilah’s harness while Marc pulled the baby out to safety, and handed her to her mother.
Thirty seconds later, the engine exploded, the window blew out in shards and flames engulfed the entire car.
Alex and Wesley then called emergency services and began directing cars to the far lane to keep traffic moving.
Lilah was unharmed and Alex overwhelmed with emotion. Last Saturday, she reunited with Wes and Marc to give them thank-you gifts. She called them “literal lifesavers,” adding, “I’ll never forget about these two, and Lilah’s going to grow up knowing who they are and what happened and how they saved her life.”
Wesley was overwhelmed by the attention, after both media and social media lit up, labeling him a ‘local hero.’
“I couldn’t bear to imagine what they would have gone through if we didn’t get the baby,” he said.
Marc added that they’d never have left the scene until the baby was safely out of the car – “any way possible.”
Wes offered a home truth for anyone loath to get involved when they pass by an emergency. “Just stop and help. You could potentially change somebody’s life. I’d do the same thing for someone else again tomorrow, because I hope that if I was in that position, somebody would do it for me.”
Dressed in a ‘Support Outlaws’ sweatshirt, with giant ear holes, his head covered in tattoos, Wes proffered one more object lesson: “A lot of people would look at me in my appearance – I am covered in piercings and tattoos, I’m a motorcycle club member – and say, Uh oh, he’s trouble.
“But I guess this just goes to show, people should never judge a book by its cover.”
Good Samaritans come in many guises. (In Biblical times, the original Samaritans were shunned as pariahs.) No matter how we dress, what we believe or who we vote for, the altruistic impulse still shines so brightly inside many of us that we will enter a burning car without thinking.
