When our lives get busy, it can become easy to cut corners in our daily routines. For instance, the technique with which I brush my teeth is not likely to be as refined when I’ve only been awake for five minutes as it is when I’ve decided that I should probably go to bed.
However, when certain tasks end up half-done, they can carry some serious consequences no matter how small they seem. Hopefully, that’s a lesson that one Minnesota woman has now learned.
On Monday morning, Chad Cheddar Mock was in the middle of a normal drive through Mankato, Minnesota.
As you can see here, he uses a dashcam in his car and on that today, it captured something that he said he wouldn’t have believed if he didn’t see it himself.
As soon as the car in front of him went around the bend, Mock was treated to a harrowing surprise.
It was hard to make out from a distance, but it seemed that a child in a car seat was sitting in the middle of the road.
As he approached, the situation became clearer.
The car he was following suddenly had its rear door ajar and both the child and the seat had apparently fallen out during that turn.
It is still unknown how the door flung open like that.
Can you imagine driving up on this scene??
If this man had been on his phone or distracted by his radio for even a couple of seconds, this story would have ended completely differently. Let’s see how the rest of this experience unfolded…
Apparently unaware of what happened, the driver kept moving as Mock slowed down.
He got out of his car and attempted to flag the disappearing car down, but this was also to no avail. The car continued to fade into the distance.
Realizing that this person was gone, Mock then approached the child to check on them.
This would also make it more likely for other drivers to notice that something was wrong and approach with caution.
Fortunately, as the dashcam footage showed, that was indeed how passers-by reacted.
While Mock spoke with the other drivers, he moved the car seat out of the road and briefly returned to his car to park it.
For that reason, the dashcam doesn’t capture what happened next, so Mock filled us in via his Facebook post.
As far as Mock could could tell, the child was unharmed and police and paramedics would later confirm that.
He also said that the driver was the child’s parent, who would eventually return to the scene.
As NBC News reported , the mother was found to have improperly secured the car seat to the vehicle’s back seat.
After police confirmed there were no injuries, they released the child back to the mother.
However, NBC News also reported that they are seeking to charge her with child endangerment and for failure to fasten a child-restraint system.
After all, the situation could have ended much worse.
Now that the stage has been set, let’s take a look at the video footage of this horrifying situation.
The footage may be hard to watch.
Mock expressed how lucky the child was that the fall took place the way it did.
His Facebook followers were also quick to point out how lucky it was that he happened to be driving behind them so he could move the little one out of harm’s way.
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Both statements become abundantly clear once you see the full video below.
It’s no surprise really that people were concerned about the parent’s role in this incident.
It’s hard to know for sure what happened, but it is being investigated.
People are very suspicious of how the car reacted during and after the incident and are convinced this was not an accident.
Again, it is hard to say at all whether this was intentional.
We are grateful the child was recovered and wasn’t hurt on the road that day.
Good on you Mr. Mock! You may have saved a life that day.
