'It Was the Human Thing To Do'

They were 30 strangers.

Thirty strangers, that's what most of the news reports called them, and every last one of them was minding his or her own business on the streets during another bustling midday in the Bronx, N.Y.

But then something happened, something really awful, and in an instant, 30 strangers decided it was their business to save a life. Just like that, they weren't strangers anymore.

I was driving on the New York State Thruway last week, listening to public radio, when I first heard the story. Until that moment, I didn't realize just how hungry I was for news about decent people doing the right thing. For months now, it seems that all we've heard about are sex scandals, suicide bombers and acts of random violence, not to mention the daily roundup of disappointing stories about human beings refusing to live up to their potential.

So when the story of the 30 strangers came over the radio, I turned to my husband in the passenger seat and said: "Did you hear that? Did you hear what those people did?"

A 33-year-old woman, her stomach swelling with the weight of seven months of life inside her, was crossing a busy intersection at lunchtime. Her name was Donette Sanz, and she was a civilian member of the New York Police Department.

Police say 72-year-old Walter Walker had faulty brakes on his van and 20 suspensions on his driver's license when he approached the same intersection.

"The light turned red, and I couldn't stop," Walker told the New York Post. "I tried to miss her."

Walker's van hit Sanz so hard that she flew through the air and into the path of an oncoming school bus. By the time tires stopped screeching, Sanz was pinned under the bus.

A crowd quickly gathered and decided something had to be done and done fast.

"Everyone in the street was yelling, 'She's under the bus!'" carpenter Madilina Diaz told a reporter.

Cheryl Brown, a stay-at-home mother, told The Associated Press that she ran out of her house and joined 10 other people trying to lift the bus.

More bystanders ran to help, and soon they were joined by others. By most counts, it took 30 people to lift the bus before Sanz could be pulled out.

"It was a beautiful thing to watch all those people lift up that bus," Brown told the AP.

Gary Burgess helped, too, but he was apparently a man of few words when reporters started asking questions.

"It was the human thing to do," was all he said.

The bystanders' quick response saved the life of Sean Michael, who was delivered by emergency Caesarean section before his mother died. He weighed 3 pounds, 6 ounces, and while he remains in the hospital, doctors sound optimistic about his future.

There's plenty of bad news in this story about a mother full of dreams who did not live to see the birth of her new son. But the story of those bystanders, those strangers, sure is a great retort to all the times we find ourselves asking, "What is wrong with people?" Makes you think that humans aren't a lost cause after all.

The late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a renowned Jewish scholar who lost much of his family in the Holocaust, once said he would love to ask God, "Why do you care about man?"

He figured he knew God's answer:

"The biggest message of the Bible and of the prophets of Israel is that God takes man seriously," Heschel said. "You remember he created Adam and Eve and they immediately failed. He was disappointed, but he kept them alive. Then they gave birth to two boys, very nice boys. … And you know what one brother did to the other. God should have been disgusted."

Instead, God said, "No, I will keep the human species alive."

God is waiting, always waiting, for us humans to get it right, Heschel said.

Seems as if those 30 strangers sure did their part to shorten the wait.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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