New body camera video shows the moment police officers in Colorado rescued a 4-year-old girl and her mother from the family’s SUV that was left hanging “precariously” over a retaining wall after a crash.
The close call was reported Tuesday evening behind a business in the city of Boulder, where a woman driving a Lexus SUV with her daughter in the backseat crashed through a wire fence, leaving the vehicle’s front wheels suspended over a 5-foot drop.
Boulder cops Raquel Ray and Carlos Castro were the first on the scene and immediately jumped into action to pull the SUV’s occupants to safety, as seen in a body camera footage released by the city’s police department on X.
In the edited clip, Ray is heard repeatedly yelling “stop” while running towards the stranded vehicle as the driver continues to rev the engine.
After finally getting the woman’s attention, Castro instructs her to turn the engine off, and then proceeds to gingerly approach the back seat, where his partner caught a glimpse of “little legs,” as she later told the news channel Denver 7.
As Castro opens the rear passenger door, he is greeted by a young girl still strapped into her car seat.
“I’m going to get you out,” the officer reassures the tot.
The 4-year-old asks Castro to get her mom out, and he promises “to help her out too.”
Ray held Castro by his belt while he reached for the youngster and helped her out of the SUV, before the female officer scooped her up in her arms and carried her away to safety.
“Do you want to talk to the firefighters?” Ray asks the girl. “They’re heroes.”
Boulder Fire-Rescue crews that by then had responded to the scene managed to stabilize the front of the Lexus, allowing the driver to climb out the back passenger door.
Both the mother and daughter escaped unharmed.
“Incidents like this involve many moving pieces (sometimes literally) and vehicle extrication is a skill that BFR firefighters routinely practice and use,” Boulder Fire-Rescue wrote on X.
Castro later explained that he had to keep his emotions in check to perform the rescue.
“If I had reacted like a father or something like that, I probably would have put myself in danger getting close to the vehicle when it was not safe to do so,” he said.
The mother, who has not been publicly identified, was charged with careless driving, reckless endangerment and child abuse — although officers are now investigating the possibility that the driver had a medical event at the time of the crash.