A man who jumped onto a school bus full of terrified children that was rolling down a Minnesota street after its driver had a medical emergency and stopped it manually said he was motivated to act by a verse from the Quran explaining that saving one life is equivalent to saving all of humanity.
“I’m a numbers man, and these numbers make sense to me,” Ebro Ahmed, 27, said Friday in an interview about his actions four days earlier outside his family’s convenience store in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “I didn’t do it for myself. It was altruism in the name of God.”
In a dramatic sequence of events captured on the store’s surveillance video, Ahmed was kicking a soccer ball and scrolling on his cell phone during a break outside his family’s Ya Bricks Snacks and Tobacco store Monday afternoon when he noticed a yellow school bus passing with its door wide open.
Ahmed said he inferred something was wrong when he saw the bus driver with foam coming out of his mouth, which can be a symptom of a seizure. He remembers instinctively sprinting towards the bus; jump through the door; and throwing his phone and glasses at two girls in front to free his hands.
His first thought was to see if he could somehow park the bus. But as frightened boys and girls screamed all around him, Ahmed said he pulled the bus’s emergency brake, stopping the vehicle without anyone on board or in the street being injured.
A statement from the Saint Paul Public School District confirmed Friday that there was a medical emergency on the bus in front of Ahmed’s family store that day, requiring paramedics to respond. Another bus picked up the 19 students on board and took them home, the district said.
Meanwhile, the driver was resting at home after being taken to hospital and released.
The National Safety Council estimates that approximately 20.3 million children ride school buses across the United States every day – a number large enough that driver-related emergencies occasionally occur.
When such emergencies occur, bystanders who think and act quickly can often help prevent disaster.
Local news outlet KTSP obtained and released surveillance video of Ahmed running toward the fleeing bus. The footage went viral alongside an interview the network did with Ahmed, in which he credited the medical TV series Grey’s Anatomy with teaching him “what to do in situations you would never see yourself in.”
Ahmed told the Guardian on Friday that the verse from the Quran stating that “he who saves one life, it will be as if he saved all humanity” also came to mind when he decided to intervene on Monday.
Additionally, he mentioned how difficult it had been for his parents – who are immigrants from the East African country of Eritrea – to run a store in Saint Paul during Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign during his second presidency.
Ahmed, who said he was born in the United States, added that the store’s business has plummeted since federal immigration agents, at the forefront of that campaign, descended on St. Paul and nearby Minneapolis in what the Trump administration has dubbed Operation Metro.
“It’s been difficult… as a small business in East Africa,” Ahmed said.
But Ahmed described a welcome sense of relief in taking advantage of the opportunity – as he called it – to portray Eritreans and represent Eritreans and East Africans “in a good way”.
He alluded to a local marketing and media company that donated $1,000 to him as a thank you for his bus exploits — a presentation that involved a Superman artist and a novelty check.
Ahmed said he was invited to speak on at least one panel and a city council member contacted him to congratulate him. An uncle in Europe also did so after learning about what Ahmed had done on the news.
Perhaps most meaningful for Ahmed, he said, was seeing his story spread in Eritrean circles.
“It makes me proud to be able to represent them in a good way,” remarked Ahmed.
Gn usa
