Each time Rebecca looked at the woman and how strangely she was acting, she became more anxious, and more so when her mother began tilting her head and turning her side. Rebecca wondered about the child’s condition.
“She came to pay for something and I was talking to her and trying to make the kid smile,” Montano remembers. Suddenly she had a blank look on her face and felt that something was wrong.
Montano told 9news.com that the young mother had a “glassy look on her face,” which made Montano “uncomfortable.”
“I was asking her if everything was fine,” Montano said, “and I grabbed the baby’s arm and started rocking, and she didn’t answer me.” “I just got lost in space, so I thought I’d better take the baby, something went wrong. And then it started falling off and I still don’t know exactly what’s going on. So I yelled at a [neighbor’s] customer who was in the store [for help]. I fell, came back, grabbed the phone called 911.”
It turns out that the woman, Jessica Heinonen, was having an epileptic fit.
Rebecca did not think twice and went straight to the table and took the baby from her mother’s arms. It was clear to Rebecca that the mother was about to die, so she scrambled to retrieve the child to keep her out of harm’s way. Seconds later, Jessica fell to the ground.
“As a mother, as a grandmother, my first instinct was to be a child,” Montano said. “I just wanted to prevent the baby from hurting herself, if she falls with the baby in her arms, who knows where that baby will land?
Jessica later explained in an update that she developed epilepsy when she was nine, but it was the first time she had not received any warning before she had a seizure.
“I usually get warnings before; [I feel] dizzy and dizzy,” she explained.
Police praised Montano’s hero for his actions.
“The police said I did the right thing to take the baby because if she had fallen with the baby it would have been very dangerous,” Montano said.
Without Rebecca, the baby would have fallen out with the mother and the potential for serious injury was high. What a timely rescue!
