A 47-year-old man from New York, and his 21-year-old daughter became heroes on Saturday when they saw a teenage girl dangling off a ride at Six Flags Great Escape outside Albany and caught her after she fell 25 feet to the ground.


“I said, ‘It’s okay! It’s okay to let go. I’ll catch you, honey,'” Matthew Howard Sr. told the AP after he heard someone screaming for help as he was leaving the park. The 14-year-old and her brother had been seated next to each other in one of the park’s Sky Ride gondolas when she somehow slipped through the safety bars and dangled from the gondola for several moments before finally falling into a crowd that included Howard and daughter Leeann Winchell, an aspiring nurse. The girl was taken to the hospital in stable condition with no serious injuries, while Howard sustained a minor back injury. “I couldn’t let that little girl die,” he says. “No one wants to put himself underneath a body like that, but I couldn’t stand by and watch.”

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